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This was the first Fuji that involved a long journey. This was fun. This was adventuring! See, the Fujis wouldn’t be so difficult – easy to do them all in a year.

Oh my sweet summer child.

Fujinomori is a suburb of Kyoto. I like Kyoto; I mean, most people do. It’s pretty hard not to like something about it, even if you find the crowds a bit much, the people a tad stuck up and even if you can’t stand that architectural monstrosity of a tower outside the station, there has to be something you like about the place.

Although, I’d be rather surprised if it was Fujinomori.

To get to Fujinomori I had to change at Tofukuji station where there a JR line and a Keihan line co-exist in apparent obscurity – you would hardly know the other exists when you are on the platform for the other one. I wonder if this is still true because according to my notes, it blew my tiny provincial mind at the time. This was also back in the days before IC cards and I apparently managed to get to my destination without any fare mistakes. Always a nice feeling that.

Not such a nice feeling were when the heavens (which, up until this point, had served as a dull backdrop, little more than a reminder to pack my umbrella) decided that (seeing as how it didn’t look like I was carrying the aforementioned umbrella) it was time to open.

By the time I got off at Fujinomori, it was bucketing down, which may not have helped my impression of the place.

The rain did help with the cyberpunk-lite aesthetic of the place. An almost invisible station tucked away behind some concrete next to a river, under a looming bridge. I was hoping that the rain was just showing off how heavy it could be, and wasn’t here to stay for the whole evening. This was back in the days before we all had maps in our pockets, but I had printed out a Google map and remembered that there was a shopping centre nearby. Good place to get an umbrella as long as it wasn’t three million miles away. Or I got lost.

Neither of the above happened. Mind you, neither did anything else of much note. I trudged through the rain around a quiet little suburb of Kyoto in the rain and, not for the first nor the last time, pondered what the heck I was doing visiting these stations.

FUJIS LEFT AT THE END OF JUNE 8th, 2006 : 55/59