Biking Kyoto.

I learned long ago that your best friends in any foreign country are the hotel staff.  Even if their English isn't perfect, they'll go out of their way to help you get where you want to go, or solve some other problem.  At the Screen Hotel in Kyoto, the staff was particularly helpful.  And their English was commendable.  I stopped by the front desk to ask if a museum I wanted visit was within walking distance.  The friendly staff said, "Yes, but why not take the bikes?"  Exactly, why not takes the bikes!? That's the kind of helpful information that makes any hotel stay better.

So the next morning we hopped on the hotel's Japanese bikes with their big baskets and brilliant locking mechanisms and headed out for a day of museum visits and sight seeing.  The verdict? If you're ever in Kyoto, absolutely, definitely, without question TAKE THE BIKES!  Kyoto is the perfect biking city with few steep hills to climb and a population that happily tolerates bike riders.  I hadn't had this much fun on a bicycle since I was a kid.

To commemorate the day, here are a couple of photos of Felix and me with our bikes:

And here is a video of us biking through Kyoto.  Sorry for the shaky video but it was my flip camera on Japanese bicycle while trying not to kill myself: