victO.Orious: Flowing Somen Noodles

Hey everyone, this is Jodie...our day started off by taking a few trains up to Kyoto's countryside. It took about us a little over an hour to get up to the mountains. We took the local train up to Kibune, where there was a special place that served somen that "shot down from a bamboo pipe." We finally made our trip up there after getting off the local train and the bus, we had about a 10-15 minute walk to find this place. As we were walking up the one way road there were tons of restaurants that were situated on top of the stream with beautiful scenery. Each place we walked by there were these little old ladies telling us to come inside.. they were a little pushy! haha. After walking, we finally found the place.. we walked in and they already knew that we were there for the somen.. we read their English menu on what to do and how there system works. After that we walked down the stairs to the somen shooting pipes where our food was soon to be shooting out. We sat down and looked at the waterfall that was right in front of us. It was a really beautiful and peaceful place to have a nice lunch. After giving us our dipping sauce and a egg like thing, we waited till our somen noodles started to shoot out the pipe.. if we weren't quick enough then it was "too bad" for us! So we had a system, the last person who was sitting at the end was the quickest chopstick user.. so just in case we weren't fast enough to catch it they could! The noodle came shooting out of the pipes and we started taking pictures and having a really great time! We had a lot of noodles and finally our pink colored noodles (Ume) came down and that signaled us that our meal was over! (Look at the video below). We had a really great lunch and started back down the streets of Kibune back to our bus and then to the local train station. After we got back, we decided to go to the Golden Pavilion! The Pavilion is made out of pure gold... We were going to see the Silver one, but decided not to because it was the same thing.. just silver! haha! After walking the whole day, about 9 miles (we had a step counter) we came back to the hotel to get some rest... later on at night we went to a little hole in the wall cafe place.. and excepted to have a full on meal.. not knowing it was a bar type restaurant. We were still hungry and decided to go to the train station to get a light meal to satisfy our stomach. We are finally back at our hotel, resting for tomorrow's adventures at the Big Buddha!!