Kyoto!

So this past week we had a 5 day weekend vacation from school and I decided to meet up with my good buddy Kevin in Kyoto and do some sightseeing. I had been before on my study tour but I could hardly even remember what I had seen. Overall it was excellent. I stayed in a local hostel, saw tons of temples and shrines, walked and biked around the city, and got to hang with Kevin and his Tokumachi friends.

I took about 200 pictures which would not only take forever to upload

here, but also would probably bore the life out of everyone, so I’ll try to just throw up a couple of my favorites here and then some more on facebook (not all 200).

We didn’t really stick to a very solid program, instead preferring to wander wherever our curiosity took us, which I believe served us quite well and proved fun. Because it was Silver week (the break) there were tons of tourists everywhere and it was a little tiresome to simply follow the crowd so we avoided this whenever possible.

The main thing to do in Kyoto is to check out the plethora of temples and shrines. All the Buddhist structures are labeled Tera or Temples so they’re easy to tell apart from the Jinja or Shrines which belong to the Shinto tradition. Either one can be a small offering spot, to a large complex of buildings, though often the temples seemed to be more elaborate and grand

Among the highlights for me was the first night’s dinner, where we ate at this excellent little traditional Japanese restaurant (2^nd picture). I also really enjoyed wandering Ponto-cho,

a small side street crammed with restaurants and bars that is famed for being an area where Geisha and their Maiko apprentice can still be spotted occasionally. This place was excellent but as it turns out is impossible to get a table at, we tried for about an hour. The 'Philosopher's Walk' (4th pic) by the creekside was excellent as well, quite peaceful compared to the rest of the city, and we even found a sketch artist drawing there who sold us copies of his works. On the last day we took this really nice hike through Fushimi Inari shrine which is the shrine of many Tori gates. The gates

are the orange ones you see which are the easiest indicator that it is a shrine instead of a temple as they only denote Shinto places. This one had so many it created a tunnel of them all along a 4km hike around the south-eastern hills above the city. It is dedicated to the harvest and the key that the fox holds is the key to the granary.

P.S. I apologize again for the crazy unorganized blog, I'll work on making it prettier/simpler. I think I might just be trying too hard to make it look just right!