Kyoto : unfortunate transportation

After getting to Osaka and realizing there wasn't really much to do in the area that was worth the time, we took most of the remaining time to visit Kyoto.

Kyoto had a huge amount of famous places to visit, but I quickly found out that unfortunately I wasn't going to be able to visit everywhere that looked nice.  There just wasn't enough time to do everything.  The first problem was where we were staying in Osaka.  We were located in a place that wasn't convenient for people who want to travel to kyoto.  Even though kyoto is located nearby if you were to look at a map, there were many trains required to get from our hostel in osaka to the kyoto station, and that took a bit of time every day.

In order to get to kyoto we would have to take a train from one end of osaka to the other.  We were nowhere near the osaka station, which is the best way to get to kyoto.  The first set of trains we took to get to osaka station would take between a half hour to an hour since one connection came pretty infrequently.  Then, we would need to take another train for a half hour to get to kyoto station.  However, before we did that every day we would stop for lunch in the underground mall of osaka or somewhere nearby.

Once we did get to kyoto station, depending on where we wanted to go we sometimes had to take a local train to the station nearest to our destination.  However, the two problems with kyoto was that most things we wanted to see were between 10 minutes to 1 hour away from the nearest train station, and that most things were not located close to each other.  There was a bit of back and forth walking to get from a station to the destination and back before heading to the next place.

So, due to our location in osaka, trains, and walking time, it was hard to see as many things in kyoto as I would have liked.  It wasn't absurd so much as that I had an unusually quick and easy time getting from one place to another in the other cities that it was slow going in comparison. If I knew this ahead of time, I could have picked a different hostel to save some time.  But even then that wouldn't change how kyoto was laid out, and the only way I could have seen everything was if I had stayed in Japan longer.