soaked to the core in kyoto

I'm soaking wet sitting on the tatami floor of my new hostel in Kyoto. In a relatively poor mood, and looking forward to a day of rain-drenched fun in Temple-Central, Japan. Backtrack~~!

Took a night bus last night and managed to sleep in a comfortable yet cramped seat. Woke up and arrived in Kyoto station and stumbled into a manga cafe for cheap internet because i had no idea where my hostel was. Because i'm such a bright young man, i used the map i printed as a bookmark in Tokyo station. To my surprise, when i looked for said map after leaving the small cafe i was wasting time in before my bus, it was gone. I copied down the directions into a notepad, lugged my luggage outside, and realized it was raining. The umbrella i bought in a convenience store not two days ago had similarly vanished. So i had to hike out to my hostel in the rain, and even though i knew the hostel would open at 8 and it was only 7:15, i decided to test the fates and brainlessly complete my quest. I was not shocked when i saw the hostel door shut, and although a head was bobbing around in a room beyond the door, it did not face me and relieve me of the elemental fury that lashed my body and valuables outside. So i walked along back to the station and ducked into Cafe Veloce, a Japanese-style Western cafe, complete with crustless sandwiches, royal milk tea, and small strawberry white chocolate scones in plastic wrappers. I devoured two sandwiches and slurped down some tea while reading some of the same book that carelessly lost my map--Number9dream by David Mitchell. In this part of the story, the main character's life and current trials become intertwined with a video game-style narrative, and it becomes hard to pull the two apart. I trudged back to the hostel at 8.15 in clothes that feel like they'd been stripped off a bloated drowned corpse. Upon entering the now lit hostel reservation room, i found the owner, a slightly bearded Japanese dude on a stool, who greeted me in English after my feeble and tired Japanese good morning. I snapped at him when we lapsed into an exchange of question and answer about internet usage and his "can" sounded much too much like "can't." I felt bad, but i also felt like a water-logged rat who just crawled out of the sewer after a thunderstorm.

And here i am! I am leaving shortly to jump around in puddles and maybe see a rainy view of a temple or two with a girl from Westchester, NY (of all places) that i just met. Although gaijin travelers can be an annoying bunch, most are more than willing to drop everything and go traipse around a foreign town with strangers. More later.