After leaving the signage store, I continued walking north into the shotengai, but stopped when I reached a wide open intersection. The smaller street I was on opened up into a large area that then forked off in two other directions. Directly to my left, there was a bookstore and I decided to take a break and head in and look at the photography section. The store was large and it took me a minute to find the section on the floor map. The second floor was my destination and up the escalator I went. What was I going to find? Well, the reality was, unless I found something that was just amazing or small enough to fit in my bag, I wasn’t going to be buying anything as I didn’t want to have to carry it. So after flipping through books for 20 minutes, there really wasn’t anything that I hadn’t already seen before at the bookstore next to Kyoto Station (that I wandered through on my first night there), so, I decided to leave.
It was so much fun wandering through the shotengai, passing all the restaurants, souvenir shops, DVD shops, Billiken statues, pachinko parlors, karaoke clubs… it seemed just totally endless.