Kyoto, Day 1

Attacking Kyoto is a bit difficult, because there is just such a huge amount of places worth visiting that deciding where to go can be challenging. Ultimately, I decided to try to knock off some of the sites farthest from my hostel the first day so that I could take Day 2 a little easier. Plus I'd found out that although I wanted to add a night to my stay at the hostel, they were out of beds the next day, so I would have to lug my bags to a new hostel the next afternoon.

Anyway -

I decided to start with a place that I'd decided I absolutely had to see, and that happened to be Kinkaku-ji, the "golden temple". The temple's setting on the edge of a small pond created a picturesque mirrored reflection on the water. It was still a bit cloudy, but the rain had mostly stopped, fortunately.

As I took the bus through the city, I realized why some people said that Kyoto can be disappointing at first. For the most part, much of Kyoto looks like other Japanese cities, although the building sizes are certainly scaled down quite a bit from the high-rise apartment buildings of Tokyo. The city is surrounded on the East, North, and West by mountains, with the city creeping up the foothills on all sides. The numerous temples and shrines are almost all situated around this city edge at the foot of the mountains. It's amazing how you can be walking through the city landscape and be just around the corner from one of these beautiful sites.

Kinkaku-ji was a good example of this, but once you step onto the grounds you feel like the city is miles away. Here are a few photos:

At one point, you can play a few hundred yen to have some traditional tea inside one of the buildings on the grounds. I decided to go for it. I took my shoes off and went in side, sitting cross legged next to some others. An older woman dressed in a kimono brought over a tray and placed a bowl of green powder tea called "matcha" and a small sugar cake in front of me. She bowed and I bowed and I started to try the tea and cake. A minute or two later two Japanese women next to me offered to take a picture and they also showed me the correct way to be doing things. Apparently I'm supposed to drink the tea first and then eat the cake. Also, I have to hold the bowl with one hand underneath and one on the side, and I have to turn it 2 1/2 times clockwise when I pick it up, and then turn it back 2 1/2 times the opposite direction when I put it down. Here's picture they took of me, holding my bowl correctly:

After Kinkaku-ji I walked about 15 minutes down the street to Ryoan-ji, which I had read has the mother of all Japanese rock gardens. While the rock garden was impressive, the landscaping around this temple was some of the most impressive that I encountered. The grounds were lush with plants, flowers, and water. Here are some photos from there:

I then hopped back on the bus for a short ride down to Ninna-ji. This was a much larger site with many different structures spread out across the landscape. Most interesting was a series of buildings which house large tatami mat floored rooms with decorated sliding paper doors, all of which are connected by narrow covered outdoor wooden walkways. This was one of the first places where the age of the structures was most apparent. At some of the other places, the wood had been painted over or restored to how it originally looked. Here, many of the wood structures just looked ancient, with grey weathered wood texture visible in every beam and column.

At night I went out to Gion again and this time decided that as a solo traveler, I had to just go somewhere and find some others to talk to (the hostel was pretty dead on this particular night). So I found an Irish bar where there would at least be a few people who spoke English. They had a decent Irish band playing, so I ordered a Guinness and I talked to the bartender for a while. She ended up inviting me to hang out at the same bar the next night with some friends of hers. I'll get to that in the next post, though.