Japan - 3 April 2023

As it’s a Travel day, we decided to spoil ourselves by sleeping in.  We only got up at around 9am, and got ourselves repacked and out the door of the hostel.  It was a bit of a relief to leave the cramped and rather manky hostel. Before catching the first set of trains, we hit our local bakery that we absolutely love to fill up on a yummy breakfast and to grab a couple of things for the road.  Robyn also wanted to grab a whole apple and apricot jam tart for pudding later on. She may have had an inkling about dinner in the monastery…  

With filled bellies we set off to Mount Koya-san.  It was a bit of a journey as we had to first catch a Osaka Metro Line to board our first train.  After a transfer at Hashimoto we got the final train to Gokurakubashi and from there a cable car up to Koya-san station.  The views all the way from Hahimoto were amazing as we wound up the valleys, going higher and higher.  The last part of the journey was a relatively short bus journey into the village, followed by a walk to our monastery.  

Our first night is in Joki-in, a local temple that lets people sleep at the monastery.  It’s a proper Japanese experience for the girls with a low table (bums on pillows on the floor) with tatami flooring.  But I think that the girls are most excited about the fact that the monastery has public baths that they can enjoy again. 

Once settled into our room, it was time to do our home schooling for the day.  We made the most of it and had a long productive home schooling session with the kids. After all that hard work we just chilled in our room before monks brought us our dinner.  It was a spread on small dishes, representing what the monks would normally eat.  In Poland we have 12 dishes for Christmas eve, well tonight we had 12 monk dishes instead, and completely vegetarian.  We had vegetables in soup, fried, deep fried (tempura style), pickled, raw, and in methods we were unable to identify.  Overall we think we could identify only half of the dishes, and while some surprised us by how good they were, others definitely did not agree with our western palette.  But we can say is that we are very proud of our girls for trying every single dish, even when they saw their parents (especially Robyn's reaction) to a particular dish! Yuck. 

After dinner we were sort of kicked out of the rooms for the monks to transform the living room into a sleeping space with futons, so we went on a nice quiet walk around the town, with a nearly full moon.  It was a peaceful walk with some gorgeous temples beautifully lit up.  

And of course we had to end the day at the public baths.  We even got properly dressed up in the yukatas provided. The girls remarked that this bath was the hottest, and I have to agree - 2 very bright pink bums at pyjama time.   

Time for bed as we have to be up for 6:30 morning prayer session.