Kobe, Japan, Happy Valentines Day!  We had a smooth night of sailing and arrived in early afternoon.  It was very cold.  As this was the ship's first visit to Kobe we were greeted with a water display from a fire boat.  There were also many people lining the balcony of the cruise terminal, many waving flags.  Some officials came on board to present flowers and gifts to the ship.  We cancelled our afternoon tour as it was very cold and our scheduled tour was to ride a tram to the top of a mountain to view the sunset.  We were able to use the time to go into the cruise terminal to take advantage of the free WiFi.  The next morning we had an early tour, 8 hours to Kyoto.  The weather was cold with light rain.  There was not much to see on the 1 hour drive as the highway is mostly enclosed in high walls, luckily we had brought our books to read.  We visited another World Heritage site, "Nijo Castle".  this dates to 1603. We then went to a Japanese lunch in a nice restaurant with a beautiful garden. Of course many passengers on our tour complained about the food!  Our other stop was a famous "Golden Pavilion" also with impressive gardens.  It was Sunday and the Kyoto marathon was being held.  This made for many closed streets and lots of people causing our bus to have to take several detours.  We noticed about 20 McDonalds during the day and many other US brands, our bus even gave out water from Costco!

Entrance to Nijo castle

Part of the castle grounds

Our Japanese lunch

Kyoto marathon runners

The "Golden Pavilion"

300 year old tree grown on a bamboo frame