Kyoto

*Pictures to come because my camera decided to go haywire when I tried to upload them. Let's hope that they aren't gone.*

Since Lindsay and Amy came to visit, it was the perfect reason to take a week off of work and travel to Kyoto and Nara, the big tourist destinations in Japan. We had a ton of fun! I’m going to break up the summary into a couple posts to make it less of an overwhelming task to read (and for me to write).

Sightseeing in Kyoto goes something like this: temple temple shrine temple shrine shrine temple castle temple shrine shrine temple*…you get the idea. The reason for this is that Kyoto was the only city spared of being firebombed during World War II (and the reason it was spared was because it was filled with historic temples).

We stayed in a fantastic little hostel in Kyoto. It was very small and was run by a Japanese guy with an Australian accent. We couldn’t find the place when we first showed up, so we called and he picked us up. Before we made it back to the hostel, he invited us to have nabe (Japanese soup cooked in a pot in the middle of the table) with the rest of the guests. The nabe was delicious and we had great half-English half-Japanese confusing conversations.

We spent the next couple days walking all around the city all day long. Between stumbling upon random shrines tucked away in the middle of shopping districts and seeking out the big famous temples we saw a lot.

There was a festival of lights in the evenings at one of the major temples while we were there. The 5-storey pagoda was all lit up and the views were magnificent (unfortunately my camera batteries died). We also got free samples of Nihon-shu (sake).

We realized just how full of large famous, old things Kyoto is on our second full day. We set out a plan to walk to a one famous place and start sightseeing from there. However, it took us most of the day to get there because we ran into one after another old famous pretty thing all the way there.

On our last day in Kyoto, we finally took it easy. We walked about for a bit and stumbled upon a Shinto wedding, which was quite a rare experience. We also saw two girls dressed as geisha. Although there are lots of people in Kyoto wearing kimono (doing so allows you free entry into all the sights), this was a somewhat rarer sight. I’m pretty sure they were just dressing up and were not actually geisha. It was the day before Amy’s birthday, so we got some fancy pieces of cake, and sat by the river to eat them. At the river we saw a crane, another rare sight to conclude the very Japanese experience of Kyoto.

*temple=Buddhist, shrine=Shinto