Been a bit, meant to write this on the flight home, but it ended up being on this old 747 which was an unpleasant flight back. But now I am recovering from the jetlag and trying to organize everything back into a normal day to day life. Found that I kind of missed work. Interesting things are always happening at the office these days, so that is good. Hopefully by the end of the month, I will have gone through all the photos on flickr and properly captioned them. Anyways, back to the trip.
After Arashiyama, the next day we decided to visit Kinkakuji, which is supposed to be the #1 attraction to see in Kyoto. Kim had talked about trying to use cabs as a good form of transport around the city, so we opted to give one a shot. The cabs in Japan are very courteous and I have never seen a typical “cabbie” as I often experience back in the US. The issue was that the cost was very high and the ride was not fast. We opted to just stick to using buses and trains, as they are cheaper and weren’t really much slower than the cab.
When we arrived at the temple, it was packed. They were not kidding when it was said this was the biggest attraction in Kyoto. When we finally managed to get to the temple, it was magnificent. Kinkakuji means “Golden Pavilion” and is this small pavilion seated on the end of this tranquil pond. It really looks amazing, even with a ton of obnoxious tourists walking all over the place (more on that in a possible post). The weather was a bit meh, but the grounds were very amazing looking, with some nice ponds and waterfalls. But at the end of the walk, there was this obnoxious tourist shop area, that was clogged with people. Really dampened the mood of the beautiful area we had just seen.
After the temple, we walked to this zen temple called Ryoanji. It was a lot less crowded and had some amazing grounds around the temple itself. The zen garden was really cool and had this (unblossomed) sakura tree that peaked over the wall in the center that would have looked glorious. I think I will try my hardest to get a sakura tree whenever I own a yard worth having one. The grounds outside had this really nice lake with a small temple in the middle on an island and a lot of nice forest around. There were a number of blossomed sakura trees around the grounds that gave us a chance to take pictures not full of Japanese tourists.
The next day, we decided to make the trip down to Nara, the first capitol of Japan, predating Kyoto. A lot of the temples and such are clustered in this large park that is known for all the deer in it. The deer are there because legend says that the deity of the shinto shrine rode one of the deers into the park. We did not make it to the shrine however. It was really raining all day, so it was overcast and we were not really excited to be getting too wet. We ventured up to see Todaiji temple, it is a huge wooden hall housing one of the largest bronze buddhas in the world. The temple is really awesome to see due to the great wooden architecture, age (some of the wood looked ancient), and the crazy statues of Buddhist deities everywhere. The wooden hall is supposed to be one of the largest wooden structures in the world, it used to be larger until it was burnt down.
On our final day in Kyoto, we finally walked to go see the Toji temple that was just south of us. I had put it off for a while, hoping that the sakura would bloom, it is supposed to be amazing with the sakura bloomed. The temple grounds are really awesome because of how they are just sort of dropped in the middle of the city, yet remain tranquil and picturesque. The main attraction is this giant pagoda in the middle of these really well done gardens. They had a shidarezakura or “weeping cherry” that was displayed prominently at the front of the gardens. We took some pictures throughout the grounds. Afterwards, we went back up to the large shopping streets to get some Japanese pickled vegetables (I need to figure out how to make my own) and wander around the shopping streets.
The next day we travelled to Tokyo via Shinkansen. I will try to write about that in a third (and final) post.