Japan: Tired kids

The past few blog posts have been from one busy day in Kyoto. It was a lot of fun, but very tiring for the children. This is Hazel before we went to the Golden Pavilion.

And this is Nina, after visiting the Golden Pavilion.

It was one of those days where everything takes a little longer than you think it will, and then there was some sort of bizarre bus delay, and then it was nearly our kids' bedtime and we still needed to take a train to Osaka. We considered bailing on the Osaka leg of our trip and just going back to Gifu, but the expensive hotel was pre-paid and non-refundable. By the time we got to our hotel, Nina and Sam had gotten a second wind and were excited to be there; Juniper and Hazel were on the verge of a complete meltdown. They were exhausted, but too hungry to go straight to bed. We decided to eat in the hotel restaurant. Aaron and the Sugiyama-Allens went to the restaurant to order, while I went to the room to get the girls ready for bed (with the goal of going straight to bed as soon as they were done eating).

I walked into the hip, swanky hotel restaurant in my travel-dusty and casual clothes, with two kids in their PJs. And these were not subtle PJs--dinosaurs and rocket ships. While in Japan, we mostly stood out for being a crowd with lots of white people. In this particular setting, I think our general family schlubbiness may have been even more remarkable than our whiteness. Every other patron of the restaurant was a very stylish, twentysomething Japanese woman. And what were they eating? Pancakes. Who knew that pancakes are currently a hip and stylish fad in Japan. We fed our children wildly overpriced pancakes; no one had a meltdown; and they all got a very good night's sleep.