Hi all, I have finally had some free time to edit photos and sit down to begin writing. It has been a very intense time since my last post and I am grateful to have this time before next week, during which we will again have a full house. Interestingly it is also Golden Week next week, so I am not sure if the foreign guests we have coming are aware of this, or it is just coincidental. What it means for them is that it will be difficult to catch any trains which travel inter prefecture, especially the shinkansen, without having reserved seats.

Anyway, returning to the spring rush, after my last post, for around three weeks, we had only two days where there were no room turnarounds, ie check-out at around 10am and check-in at around 2pm. This is a fairly intense process of stripping, cleaning and re-setting – very physical and has to be done fast. It also produces a lot of washing to be done and subsequent ironing. As we have no dryer it all has to hang outside, so, if it rains that can cause delays (which it did…). As a person who has studiously avoided ironing all my life (mainly by buying clothing that does not require ironing, especially linen), I suddenly found myself doing a LOT of ironing. On one day I did over 6 hours of ironing!!!

What all of this caused was a major shortage of sheets, quilt covers and pillowcases. There were times when I was ironing pillowcases straight out of the washing machine, though it wasn’t possible for the larger items, so Craig was ironing after dinner while we watched tv. Our washing machines, along with the dishwasher, were running flat out to keep up with all the cleaning and we also had to buy a new iron at one point, as the old one was struggling.

The other side of the workload was, of course, providing breakfasts every morning for a lot of people. This required a lot of shopping and prep work, most of which was carried out by Craig. All in all, it was quite tiring and made me think that we should put a stop to one night stays (because they caused a lot of the more intense work), which we have now done on Booking.com. Many of the one-nighters were also not vegan or vegetarian and were causing some issues. Having said that, a few of the non-veg crowd were very nice, including an older French man who spoke very limited English but went to the trouble of writing a thankyou note in English to give us before he left.

One other major issue with having room turnarounds day in and day out is that we were unable to go out to do any personal shopping on those days. All in all, a learning experience and we are now better prepared for any future peak times and have adjusted the information and settings on Booking.com to try to improve our situation. The flip side is that we did have some lovely people staying here, one of whom was not vegan but who chose to stay with us because we have the rainbow flag on our home page. So, we also provided a place for her to stay where she felt accepted and comfortable 😊.

Weather-wise, it was warmer earlier than usual in March which actually brought the blossom on earlier than it would normally open. In fact, I believe it was the earliest blooming since records began to be kept of these things (ie, quite a long time ago). We have also had a bit more rain than usual which didn’t help keeping the blossom on the trees. As a result of all of this many people who had booked to stay in Kyoto specifically for blossom viewing were a little disappointed, and there were a lot of people in Kyoto, comparable to the crowds in 2019 (ie pre the ‘difficulties’).

During the time when we were flat out, the blossom came and went but we did manage to get out on the two available days to do some hanami (blossom viewing). Knowing we would have a little time, I tried to find somewhere reasonably close that we had never been to before and found a small shrine – Rokusonno jinja – which had a small collection of trees. It was about a 45 minute walk from home, but near the Aeon Mall where we do a lot of our shopping, so we were able to combine the two into a nice (longish) walk.

The shrine was first established on the site in 963, however the main building was rebuilt in the early 1700s, as it had been damaged due to various conflicts previously. After visiting the shrine, we walked to the mall via Toji temple, finding a really interesting building behind the temple which appears to be a school associated with the temple. It is a very grand, rather monumental looking building, somewhat reminiscent of Egyptian design.

As usual, we also got photos of the local blossom trees.

The other outing was a walk into to town, via Kiyamachi dori, one of my favourite streets in Kyoto, also to do some shopping for the business. It was a lovely sunny day, the blossom was gorgeous and the crowds were heaving. It felt really good to be out in the sun and walking. Neither of us have had time to undertake our usual exercise regime since mid to late March, so I needed to stretch out my legs with a nice long walk!

On a side note, our kittens – Zara and Akashi – turned 1 year old on the 12^th of April. They are both larger than their mum but still very active (in a kitten-like way), and when they are really worked up they run, jump and fly over the furniture, at which time it is better to be out of their way. Sometimes they start up just after dinner, at around 9:30pm, when tired guest house operators need their rest… Also, our wisteria plant has bloomed properly for the first time.

That’s all for now.

In the next episode: visitors arrive from Australia!

Cheers!

We had a new visitor recently – a very large, full-tailed version of Tahlia.

The tiniest iron of them all!

Our wisteria!

The lovely, local, port wine magnolia

Just lazing around

Watching them watch us!

The Ikebana critic at work

My latest efforts – the first one ended up looking a little like a flower alien, and the second came about because one of the kitten terrorists stole two of the front flowers…

A new dahlia for the garden

It’s a crows life…