The YA from Japan from Julia’s year lives in Tokyo. When Julia was trying to coordinate a time with her when we could meet, it turns out we were both travelling to Kyoto on the same day. So we met her at the main train station and she helped us navigate buying the high speed train ticket and then spent the afternoon with us in Kyoto.
The train was pretty cool to ride, a bit like a much more spacious airline setup. I had my GPS app running on my phone and we got to 264 kph at one point in time. A cool sensation to see the ground going by at that speed.
At the Kyoto train station our friend took us to a sushi restaurant where you just grab the plate off a little conveyor belt that loops around the resturant.
Sushi and hot water for your tea.
After lunch we took a local train to Arashiyama (Bamboo Forest).
Right next to the Bamboo Forest was the Tenryuji Temple. This Zen Buddhist temple you could pay to tour both the gardens and enter some of the buildings.
I’ve never taken a picture of a public bathroom before but I had the place to myself and this was such a unique situation I felt like I should. The temple required you to remove your shoes to enter the facility and I was unsure if I wanted to go in to a public men’s washroom in just my socks. Their solution was a slightly raised bamboo walkway with wooden clogs to wear at each stall. The ladies tell me theirs was the same. That was a first for me.
After our outing our friend found a tea house in an old house for dinner. We got to experience eating at a low table and chairs with no legs.
The next day we had a change of pace morning based upon a recommendation from Julia’s co-worker in Tokyo. She had told us about an art store where you can do a traditional ink stenciling on different cloth-based objects in a little workshop called Kyo-Yuzen. The closest North American equivalent I can think of is those shops that you can paint pottery. After finding the shop down a small little alley way, we had an absolutely wonderful morning doing something off the beaten path.
Our afternoon excursion was to the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine. Though there were a few buildings there that were pretty interesting, what really made this one unique was the hundreds of arches following winding paths up the mountain. Some of them were so close to each other it formed a tunnel. There was way more of them then I expected and we walked a couple of kilometers in and out of various archways.
