The concept of a Cat Cafe is where you pay to enter and can order food or drinks if you wish, while you pet the cats.
Shoes must be removed and hands washed before entering. The place was very clean and smelt fine. There were lots of cats, but they were quite ugly!
We tried to pat some but they weren't particularly interested in us. Then the cafe lady patted some of the cats to show us how to do it. They rub the cat's back very roughly and then slap quite hard at the end of the cat's back, just before the tail. The slapping of the cat's back makes a lot of noise, like banging a drum!
Bec was happy to have made it to a cat cafe, so we were able to move on to more exploring.
We caught the subway to the main station to meet up with a tour group to visit two Shinto shrines and a Buddhist temple.
First stop was Heian Jingu Shrine. We bought a fortune cookie thing at the shrine. Bec's fortune was the best of the five possible fortunes, so she was happy. Mine wasn't so good, the fourth of the five levels.
When people get a bad fortune paper, they tie it to poles or trees at the shrine, to leave their bad fortune there. Unfortunately, I didn't find the place to leave my bad fortune at the Shinto Shrine, so I tied it to the pole at the Buddhist Temple - I'm sure they won't mind!
We visited Sanjusangenado Temple with its 1,001 impressive images of Buddha and the Kiyomizu Temple, which was built into the side of a mountain and had a view back across Kyoto, where Kyoto Tower could be seen in the distance.
The walk back to the bus was via a narrow street lined with shops and filled with crowds of tourists and school groups on excursions.
We met up with Renee and Matilda for dinner, which we had in one of the hundreds of restaurants in the Kyoto Train Station. The station contains three multi-storey department stores and a maze of arcades containing shops selling every conceivable item you can imagine. It's huge! Like a crazy maze. Easy to get lost in and often hard to find the exit to the real world.
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