Kyoto with Roley and Megumi

On the weekend of Roley’s stay in Japan, Roley and I had planned to go on a trip to Kyoto. Kyoto is probably one of my most favourite places in Japan so far because it is such a pretty town. It has so much history and so many temples and cool sight-seeing places. When we arrived, we met up with a girl called Megumi. Roley and I met Megumi for the first time on our Contiki tour in New Zealand in 2006. She is really nice and she lives in Kyoto. Roley emailed her and told her he was coming to Japan so he organised for us to go and visit her in Kyoto. We went out for dinner with her at this cool restaurant and we had a really good time. I got really excited that I had another Japanese friend to talk to and visit while I was in Japan. Megumi is such a cool person and she is so funny!


After tea, we went for a walk around the streets of Kyoto. Kyoto has a really busy night life and there are lots of older men walking around after work enjoying themselves walking from one bar to the next! We went for a walk down the river which is where all the young university students hang out on weekends.


We were having this conversation about blood types. In Japan, knowing your blood type is so important. So much in fact, that people even write what their blood type is on their business cards! Megumi couldn’t believe it when Roley and I said that we didn’t know what our blood type was because everyone in Japan knows their blood type. It is like knowing your star sign and if you have a certain blood type it means you are a certain type of person. AB means that you are strange. I know this because Megumi is AB and it is not a common blood type.

Anyway, after our long-winded conversation on blood types, we walked past this huge group of young university students sitting by the river. I told Megumi to ask them what their blood type was. So sure enough, she went up to the entire group and said, “ketsuekigata wa nan desu ka?” (I learnt how to say ‘what is your blood type’ in Japanese just in case I needed to ask someone one day!) They all went around in a circle taking turns to tell us what their blood type was! It was crazy! I couldn’t believe it. Then they asked her if she was a professor or something because they thought she was doing a survey! She was just being her strange AB-blood type self! Then, every group of people we walked past, she would ask for their blood type. Roley and I were almost rolling around the floor laughing! It was classic! Everyone thought it was strange that we didn’t know our blood type!

We made friends with one of the groups along the river and this funny girl who had had a few drinks kept on saying, “happy, happy happy!” because I guess she was happy! She kept on hugging me and jumping up and down and saying we were friends! She was really funny!

So that was the end of our crazy night in Kyoto with Megumi. It was a good start to our trip in Kyoto.