Uji - 宇治市

Uji is a small prefecture a little bit outside of Kyoto that is known for their green tea (and I'm pretty sure this is where the dessert store Uji in Berkeley/SF is named after). It's about an hour and 40 minutes from my house.

Before my friend and I got to Uji, we decided we wanted to rent some bikes to travel around, since most places were within walking distance of each other. When we got to the rental place we found in someones youtube video, we decided not to rent bikes because the bikes looked really old, and we had to return them within the next 3 hours or we had to pay an extra late fee. So we walked around looking for food. Check the food section to see what we had!

An interesting place to visit is Byodoin Temple. This temple is actually the temple shown on the back of the 10 yen coin! The entrance fee was ¥600, and you could also pay an extra fee to get a tour of the inside of the temple. But the ¥600 got you entrance to the grounds, as well as the museum inside that showed many different interesting artifacts.

Since Uji is best known for their green tea, of course we had to have some. We found a small place that does tea ceremonies for ¥500. When I took Japanese in high school, my teacher took us to Japantown in SF every year. During our second year we sat through a tea ceremony. Its a pretty intricate process with lots of little details. Someone works in the corner to heat the water and make the first cup of tea, which goes to the first person. There are a whole bunch of things you're supposed to say (like to the person who sets the tea in front of you, you say something to thank them or something along those lines). There are also several different rules (for lack of a better word) to follow. One of them is when you receive the cup, you don't drink right away but instead take time to admire the beauty of the cup. Then you turn the cup so that the side with the beautiful painting is facing outwards. You should finish all the tea in 3 sips only, and once you finish you should wipe where you drank from. You also get served some Japanese confectionaries, and you don't want to stab them with the bamboo stick since stabbing is kind of aggressive. There are probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting but despite these things it's an amazing experience to be apart of, and if you can I definitely recommend trying to attend a tea ceremony.

The types of sweets served differ between teahouses

So according to reviews online there was a cool suspension bridge somewhere along the river. My friend and I decided to walk to it since the pictures looked cool and it didn't seem like that far of a walk. Well we were mistaken. It was a fairly long walk on a very narrow sidewalk, it was freezing cold (even colder since we were right next to the water), and the bride was aight smh. One cool thing we did notice was in the river, the section closest to the shore was running in the opposite direction of the rest of the river (is this a normal thing with rivers?? I feel like I've never noticed this before). We ended up regretting not renting the rusty bikes since that would've shortened our travel time.

Shown here: the completely uninteresting suspension bridge

When we were walking back to the station, we passed the temple again and decided to go into the Starbucks right across from it (how weird is that.. you have a very old temple right across from a fancy fancy Starbucks?) Again, I thought this Starbucks was fancy because of the matte black background where it said "Starbucks Coffee". When I was waiting for my drinks, I saw they were looking to hire new people. The pay rate was ¥850 (or maybe ¥900) an hour. This was so weird to me since here in the states its usually $11-$15 an hour. But this Starbucks outdoor section had little cupholder tables! And there were also blankets to use if it got too cold (its the small things in life :3)