Well we arrived in Kyoto on Tuesday night and again we were pleasantly surprised to find our hostel a short walk from the station. We bought microwave dinners and had an early night as we had to get up at 5:30am the following morning to go and visit the sumo stable!

Our alarms went off and after pressing 'snooze' several times we decided we had better get up as our taxi was booked for 6:15. It arrived on time and we headed to the sumo stable. It is owned and run by Takanohana, an ex-sumo wrestler who held the Yokozuna rank for 8 years and won 22 championships. If you research him on google images the pictures of him show him to be huuuuge! But he has obviously lost weight since retiring and is now a slim and muscly trainer to up-and-coming sumo wrestlers.

We arrived at the stables just before 7am and they were already half way through their gruelling morning practice. We were invited in to watch them train and were shown to our ring side seats on tatami mats on the floor. We were given Japanese tea and Laura (who doesn't even like English tea!) felt she had to drink it in order to be polite! Unfortunatley, by the time she had plucked up the courage to drink it, it had turned stone cold and tasted like seaweed! But she downed it in one anyway, but then was politely told by our guide that she was actually meant to sip tea.

It was a freezing cold Japanese morning and the rain was hammering on the roof... and to make matters worse, people kept coming in and out and opening and closing the door! There was a constant breeze and no heating whatsoever! But our attention was on the sumo wrestlers... they were just how you imagine them to look. Huge men, some very hairy, wearing thick cloth to cover their manlihood! There were six wrestlers in total and they each practiced two at a time inside the ring, whilst the others did various exercises around the outside.. some quite humorous to watch!

Each practice lasted for nearly an hour and by the end of each one we were amazed that each man was still standing! It was so amazing and incredible to watch. They're so devoted to sumo and take even the practice so seriously. Steam was rising off their bodies, remeniscent of the Beppu Hells, because it was so cold outside but they were each sweating like a glass blowers arse! We felt especially sorry for the last sumo as he took a real beating! He was in the ring for over an hour and a half and was singled out to perform different exercises at the end, each as horrific as the next!

We were also especially lucky to be invited on this day as there was a TV crew there filming for some kind of news report or documentary. When the stick-thin presenter of the TV company first walked through the door dressed in a kimono down to his knees we were struck by the lack of meat on his legs! Like a young girl had just entered the room... pasty, scrawny and hairless! He then took of the kimono to reveal tight white cycling shorts and a sumo nappy on top. Then bravely he stepped into the ring alongside one of the sumo wrestlers who was about 5 times larger than him, and started to limber up! Takanohana gave him a few personal tips and then the match began! It was extremely funny to watch and everyone in the room was laughing - even the big serious sumo bosses!

After this event we were invited in for breakfast with the wrestlers. It was such a privilege to be invited to watch the sumo wrestlers practice, let alone be invited in for breakfast. Our guide told us that we were very lucky, and not even Japanese people get invited to eat with them!

The sumo wrestlers had cooked us a banquet for breakfast, fit for a king and large enough to feed the five thousand, even though it was only 9 o'clock in the morning! It consisted of chanko-nabe which is a massive pot of soup in the middle of the table mixed with lots of different vegetables and meats like chicken, carrots, tofu and button mushrooms. We were also given a bowl of rice, pieces of fish, battered chicken, different pickles that they had made themselves, and they kept bringing out local delicacies that they made us eat! For example, soya beans in a thick, stringy, gloopy, snot-like gel, a plum that was dry on the outside but extremely sharp and sour on the inside, and horse liver (which only Martha braved!). Most of these things were just left on the table, and they were shocked to see how little we'd eaten and kept trying to get us to eat more and more because they thought we were still hungry!

The sumo wrestlers gathered round us and were asking us lots of questions about where we were from and what we were doing in Japan. We showed them a little map that we had creatively rustled up the night before explaining what we were doing and where we are travelling over the next few months. We got the Japanese lady behind reception at the hostel to write it all down in Japanese for us! It went down a treat and Takanohana told us that if we ever got in any trouble just call his name and he would come and rescue us! And one of the wrestlers confessed that his 'number one movie' was Braveheart... mostly down to the romantic love story which made him cry! As we got up to leave they handed us a small present each and told us that they had paid for our 30 minute taxi journey back to our hostel! It was a truly amazing experience that we will never forget... a big thanks to Helen who managed to arrange it for us!

That afternoon we decided to visit Nijo castle. We managed to get away with paying 350 yen for an under 16's ticket... thank god, as it would not have been worth the full price of 700 yen! They didn't even look twice at us... the Japanese are so trusting! It was basically just an extremely large and empty house with squeaky floors and a massive garden... which we got kicked out of because it was closing time! How unfortunate! The best bit about it was the hot chocolate we bought half way round. Only 100 yen and oh so creamy!

On Thursday we went to the Golden Temple which is a the most famous temple in Japan. It is a temple made nearly entirely of gold leaf. It was really busy and there was lots of Japanese tour groups going round... we walked round the whole route in less than 5 minutes! The temple was very beautiful and the gardens were exquisite... but we couldn't help feeling that it should have been free... and that the ice creams we bought were the best bit about it (again)!

In the evening we went to Gion (if anyone has ever read Memoirs of a Geisha it is the same area as where the book is based!) to watch the opening night performance of a special show at Gion Corner, which includes performances of many different Japanese arts like tea making, flower arranging, maiko dancing, puppet shows and many more... some of which were very bizarre! Nyima was chosen as a volunteer and had tea made for her by a Japanese geisha! In the small streets surrounding Gion there are a number of tea houses where real life geisha still visit today. There were lots of tourists waiting to catch a glimpse a them emerging or going into the tea houses and we were lucky enough to be stood right next to a tea house when a taxi pulled up and two geisha climbed out. Unfortunately we were stupid enough not to realise what was happening before a stampede of people came running over with their cameras out... and by the time we had found our cameras they had gone!

Today we are heading back to Tokyo for our final few days... we probably wont be able to write a blog for a few days so you will most likely hear from us when we get to Singapore!

Bye for now! xxx