Guest Blog from Miss Kelly Whiddett........

Hi everyone, rather than let Alan have all of the fun, I thought I would step in for today. Here are the bits that Alan has left out……..

First up, Pigeon fights back!!!

As many of you will know I am petrified of pigeons. When sitting in a park near the Imperial palace gardens resting my feet, a pigeon joined me. Snap happy Alan, decided to take a photo of the pigeon, (as if he had never seen one before!!) rather than get rid of it, and did this whilst resting on a nearby seat. The resulting wet patch on his jeans from the wet seat, served as a reminder of why I don’t like pigeons… (I’m not sure why this didn’t get into Alan’s blog??)


In other news……

It’s official. Smoking is KOOL!!!
Although it is only KOOL to smoke in enclosed spaces such as restaurants and bars, and not whilst walking or waiting for a bus. Bizarre.





80”000 restaurants and not a Japanese thing to eat.
So, for those of you in York, have you ever walked down Gillygate past the Japanese restaurant and wondered why they have plastic food in the window??? I have laughed at the plastic spag bol many times whilst walking home. Now I wish that I had paid more attention to the array of food formed from plastic, as this is the way many restaurants in Japan display what they have to offer. I have to say that plastic food doesn’t look very appetising, particularly when you have no idea what it is! The other option, which is even more mind-boggling for the non-Japanese speaker, is the vending machine style restaurant. You select your dish from a picture and then order and pay for this OUTSIDE the door through a vending machine. You may only enter the restaurant once you have selected and paid for your dish, where it is then freshly prepared for you.
So far, the food we have managed to order and eat: McDonalds, Mos Burger, Pizza from an Italian restaurant (the menu was in Italian, but we could read that!!) We remain hopefully of finder something Japanese which looks edible and we at least have a clue what it is, so that we can intake some much needed fibre and veg.






UPDATE: Japanese food eaten on way to Kyoto TODAY!!! We bought a Bento box, which is the Japanese version of a Boots meal deal. It has a variety of cold dishes inside, and we tried most of them. The rice was nice, until we realised that it was full of tiny shrimp heads… yuk!


MIA – we remain on def com 4, in the vain hope of finding the missing train pass. Kelly commented “I reakon that it will be found in a few months time when it is completely useless” Looking forward to that!!!!

Fresh off the press today….. We have arrived in Kyoto, which seems really nice. Travelling on the bullet train at c200mph made us both feel a bit queasy for a while, (or was it that bento box???). We have a small room at a hostel near the train station, which is very nice and we even have our own balcony. We are planning to wander around a bit more tonight and possibly have a few drinks…

We hope that you are all ok, back at home. Alan checked the weather for Kyoto tomorrow at it is going to be sunny and 18 degrees, he also checked the weather for York which was -1, which made us both chuckle, just a little.

Hope you enjoyed my blog,
Kelly xx