Work & play in Kyoto

I recently traveled to Kyoto for two days to attend a teaching conference about extensive reading.  There were many well-known speakers in the field attending, so it was one of the better conferences that I've been to.  

Since I was in Kyoto, I also made sure to do some sightseeing to places I hadn't visited before.  My first stop was the Kyoto Imperial Palace.  This is where the Emperor lived when Kyoto was the capital of Japan (until 1869 when the capital moved to Tokyo).

To have a tour of the palace, you need to make reservations prior to the day, although the tour is free.  It was a one-hour tour and all of the tour was from the outside of the palace buildings.  We weren't allowed to enter the buildings.  Still, the buildings and gates were very beautiful:

For lunch, I had nishin-soba (Pacific herring in buckwheat noodles in soup), which is a well-known dish of Kyoto.  Very delicious.

In the afternoon, I visited the small town of Ohara, which is just north of Kyoto.  There is a famous temple there called Sanzen-in.  The temple had wonderful wooden hallways that were nice and cool for my feet.  I've figured out that one of my favourite things is walking barefoot in quiet temples.  They also had a beautiful garden:

Outside of the temple, the ground was covered in moss and there were faces carved in rocks placed here and there.  It was very peaceful to walk around:

Here is another picture I took at the temple as well as another nearby temple:

Winter trip 2007 - Kyoto

This is the second part of our winter trip. You can see our first part in Hiroshima in the post below this one. On day 3, we took a 5-hour train ride to Kyoto. We were able to look around just outside of Kyoto in the late afternoon upon arriving. We first went to Fushimi Inari Shrine. Inari shrines are one type of shrine and foxes are one symbol you often see there:You will also find many red gates there. The inari shrine in Kyoto has thousands of gates all in a row that slowly work there way up a mountain and then back down again. Here is a shot of the gates that we passed through:
On the other side, there are inscriptions of who donated the gate to the shrine. You can see the man here painting in an engraved part on a new gate:
There were also fascinating mini-shrines everywhere as well. Each one is for some demi-god:
Also, we saw quite a few cats there as well:
I was amazed at how many mini-altars I could see there. I had previously been to one Inari shrine before in Toyokawa and they have become my favourite kind of shrine. Here was a cute collection of clay foxes in front of an altar:
After, we had some dinner near the shrine. I had tempura on rice called "tendon" and Ayako had "inarizushi" which is rice inside deep-fried tofu:
The next day, we started a walking tour of the north-east side of Kyoto. We went passed the Kyoto kabuki theater. This is actually a shot from later that night:
Here is a close-up shot of some of the outside decorations of the building during the day:
We then passed through Gion, which is the area famous for geisha. It still has a traditional feeling to it. This is what the area looks like during the day:
Here is a picture of a cook outside a restaurant taking a break:
And here was a picture of Gion at night time (it was pretty quiet then):
Close to Gion is Yasaka-jinja (temple). It has a brightly coloured entrance. I actually did come here 2 years ago just after New Years:
On New Year's Eve and for the next few days, thousands of people will come to pray for a good upcoming year and to receive their fortunes. You can see some people praying here. They throw some money over the fence, ring the bell, clap 2 times, and say a little prayer:
We then passed by Chion-in. There is a large bell here that will be rung 108 times at New Year's. Lots of people will come here to pray as well:
On the day we went, there was another ceremony going on, with the inside filled of people waiting for a ceremony to start:We then proceeded to Nanzenji temple which has a beautiful rock garden (Hojo garden). I started to enjoy visiting rock gardens during the trips, so expect more to come:
We then found "Philosopher's Path", which eventually leads up to the Silver Temple. It was a nice long path alongside a stream which I'm sure is very beautiful during the spring or fall:
Alng the path, we came to Honen-in, a quiet little temple, with lots of moss everywhere:
The next major stop was Ginkakuji temple, which is suppose to be a silver temple, but you can see there is nothing silver about it:
It did have wonderful sand sculptures representing a mountain and lake in front of it though:
This next picture looks a bit more like a lake from this view:
And I think all the moss from Honen-in crept over to to Ginkakuji since the place had wonderful, various forms of moss everywhere. Ayako and I thought a better name for the place would be Mossland:
While we were walking back towards the centre of town after seeing many temples, I took this photo of a large gate to yet another temple, but with the view of everyday life included in the forefront:
We headed for Ponto-cho (a small street filled with nice, small restaurants) to have dinner. You can see the kabuki theatre in the background of this next photo. After walking the long length looking at the various restaurants, we decided to go to a restaurant at the beginning of the street:
It was on the 5th floor of a building and we had a great night view. We ate shabu-shabu. You can see me here dipping the thinly-sliced meat into the hot water to quickly cook it and then I dip it in one of the sauces in front of me:
The next day, we headed to the north-west side of Kyoto. We first went to Kinkakuji temple, which has a (very) gold temple. This was by far the most crowded place we went to on our trip with bus loads of people going there:
Here's a closer up view of the temple. It was great seeing it on a sunny day:
Close by was Ryoanji temple, which has the most famous rock garden in Kyoto. While I liked the garden a bit more than the one I saw the day before, this one I had to share with many people, while I could view the other one by myself for quite awhile:
There was also a nicely-designed wash-basin there with an inscription that means "I learn only to be contented":
From there, we took a short train trip out of Kyoto to Arashiyama area. We saw the outside of Tenryuji temple, but since we'd seen lots of temples up to that point, we were happy to skip it. We did have a lovely walk through a bamboo grove though:Here's me walking through the grove:On our last day in Kyoto, we headed for the south-east corner of Kyoto. We first saw Sanjusangen-do, which has 1001 statues of a Buddhist deity. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take any photos there, so I can't show you any here. We continued on towards Kiyomizu temple, which is very famous. The path we choose led us through a public graveyard:I was able to get an interesting shot of Kyoto tower in the background behind many graves in the forefront:As you can see below, there were many, many graves packed together here:Here is the entrance gate for Kiyomizu temple, which looked great with the blue sky that day:And here is Ayako with Kyoto in the background:We wandered around that area looking at the many wonderful small shops in the area. I saw this nice path and decided to see where it led:It led me to Kodai-ji temple. Since I hadn't see a rock garden yet that day, I decided to get one last view of one for this trip:
Here's another shot of it:And so that wraps up the second part of our winter trip. I was glad to get to see two important cities of Japan during this trip. Hope you enjoyed the photos.

Kyoto

The day after returning from Korea, I got on the shinkansen (bullet train) and went down to Osaka to visit my friend Craig (who I taught with in Toronto). It was my first time on the bullet train since arriving in Japan and so I could enjoy it more this time. I was amazed how smooth and quite the ride was even though we were travelling at 300 km/h. Smooth enough that I fell asleep both there and back again.
I even got to see some snow as we went a bit north and inland on the way to Osaka:

Since there were only 2 stops on the way, it only took 90 minutes to get to Osaka, which is 300km away.

The next day, I did a day trip with Craig to Kyoto. I was amazed at the wide selection of souvenir stores there that actually offered interesting gifts that weren't too expensive. I also liked that each store actually sold different things than the store next to it.

First, we made our way to Kiyomizu temple, which draws lots of tourist. It's very popular in the spring for its cherry blossom trees, but was still busy the day we went, even though it was winter.

We made sure to get some good luck by rubbing little statues:
And I took a chance and shook a wooden box with a small hole in the bottom where one stick will drop out. As you can see, the timing of the photo was good...just as the stick was coming out.
My fortune (which was the 2nd best out of five and told me I'll have a pretty good year^^):
Next, we went to Yasaka shrine, where first we washed our hands to purify ourselves before going in:
This shrine is one of the most popular to go to at New Year's to pray and to get you fortune for the next year. It was still busy the day with lots of people getting their fortunes.
Walking around one park, we even saw some fancy cars.
Another thing I liked about Kyoto was walking along the narrow stone streets. There were a number of rickshaws that you could rent a ride from:
We were also lucky to see a maiko (apprentice geisha) or 2 having their photos taken. I'm not sure if they were real maiko or just made up to look like one for photos. Still, it was neat to see them.