Hello from Kyoto

After leaving Tokyo, Mom and I went west, leaving Tokyo's ancient capital full of temples and cherry blossom trees! Because there are literally no hotels in Kyoto right now during cherry blossom season (trust me, I think we e-mailed or called every one to ask for a room) we ended up staying in Osaka, which, now that we think about it, I think we're pretty grateful for considering just how crazy Kyoto was. So...on Wednesday we hopped on a bullet train to Osaka!

They're ridiculously fast once you get out of the city...but its actually kinda of cramped. Where you're supposed to put your luggage on top was really cramped and because the ceiling was curved, we couldn't put our bag up there, so we had to rather awkwardly cram it between our legs. The train also banks and turns like a plain some times, and I honestly felt queasy at some moments and my ears kept popping when we went through the tunnels under some of the mountains. On the plus side though, we ever so briefly did get to see Mt. Fuji! So if you're ever on a bullet train heading out of Tokyo heading west, make sure you get on the right pair of seats (D and E) so you can get a good view!

Our hotel in Osaka is actually pretty nice, albeit a little small in certain areas. The bed and pillows are reaaaaaaally comfy, and they left me cookies, flowers and a little Japanese card for my birthday! Since we had all ready spent half the day traveling and didn't feel like journeying into Kyoto that night, we stayed in Osaka and went to Universal City to go visit Hard Rock and get a T-shirt for my brother.

We accidentally slept through our alarm the next day and were rushing to get to Kyoto the next morning. Once we finally got there...things were confusing. Kyoto is a lot bigger than any map leads you to believe, and streets are frequently left out, so you can't exactly just count intersections. In addition, Kyoto is not what I would call an easily accessible city. There's not many trains in the city, because they couldn't exactly go burrowing tunnels under all the ancient temples, so there are a lot of crowded and confusing buses instead. And those buses are crowded. When you think they can't fit more people on those buses, they find a way somehow.

Anyway, we some how, we're still not sure how, we made our way to Sanjuusangendo temple, a really pretty temple with lots of sculptures of 1000 armed cannon, and a bunch of other gods. Unfortunately, we couldn't take any pictures (literally there was an Engrish sign that said "NO PICTURES. WE SEIZE IF YOU TAKE. CAMERA WILL BE CHECK AT END")...but it was pretty, so if you can actually find it, I recommend going. After that, we somehow found our way to Kiyomizdera, one of the most famous temples in Kyoto, and when I say somehow, I really do mean it. We wandered up a back road up the mountain to find it that took us through a cemetery where we saw hundreds of graves. Mom pointed out that was the first time since coming to Japan that we'd had any sort of space at all since there was no one around...so, if you're not a people person and like your space, I recommend just hanging out in a cemetery.

Kiyomizudera was rainy, though very pretty. and had there not been a lot of clouds, I'm sure that there would have been incredible views from the huge balcony type platform they had that over looked Kyoto. But I'm sure it kept the crowds down. The temple also had a famous "love rock" which is two holy rocks placed 30 some odd feet a part, that supposedly, if you can walk from one to the other with your eyes closed ensures you years of good fortune in love. It was no small feet with the amount of crowds that were the there and the fact that I was terrified that someone was going to poke my eye out with their umbrella or I was going to do that to someone else...but I did it! I also bought a special cup at the base of the temple and drank from the pure springs that the temple is named for :D

From then on, we wandered to some really cool little streets with all manner of shops that, in America, would have been classified as pedestrian streets, but turned out clearly not to be the case when I almost got run over. Still the streets were really cool to see and we some how found our way to Kodaiji, which is a temple/garden built by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's widow Nene in his honor, and his final resting place. Yay for being a Japanese history nerd, and kudos if you know who he is.

In all seriousness though, two things you should know, if you're going to go around Kyoto, either buy a bus pass and only ride the 100's for the buss es, as they will talk to you in English and tell you where you should get off for certain things (though good luck when you do get off to find them), book yourself on a tour or hire a Japanese translator, because as I said, Kyoto is not an easy city to get around in at all, and if you don't speak a lick of Japanese, godspeed, because I don't know how I would have done it without talking to locals and police officers. also bring your best walking shoes! I wore flip flops and was paying for it all day and then some. The grounds to these temples are extremely uneven and rocky and very hard to walk on...so choose your foot ware carefully!

15 miles later (according to my pedometer) and towards the end our our day, we made it to Ginkakuji or the Silver Pavilion (not to be confused with Kinkakuji, the gold pavilion, also in Kyoto) which isn't actually silver but has some beautiful gardens, and walked along the Path of Philosophy which was beautiful and lined with Cherry trees. Once again rainy, so we sat on a newspaper on a bench in order to sit and watch the trees! They're really really pretty, but up close, they actually look a lot more white than they do far away. The plum blossoms actually look for pink than they do, so I was surprised by this. They're still very delicate and pretty though. We didn't really get to see any in Tokyo since it was so cold, so this was a treat :)

We tried find food to get in the area before heading back to Osaka, but since all the temples and stuff close at 5/5:30...we noticed something really weird for a city. Everything shuts down. Shops, restaurants, cafes, stores...everything! It was the weirdest thing! (This is why I said it was fortunate we were staying in Osaka...plus at the end of the day we were relieved to get out of the insanity that was Kyoto during cherry blossom season) We quickly gave up on that venture and after much confusion with the buses, we made our way back to Kyoto station and Osaka....it was truly truly exhausting day! We have one more day in Kyoto...so I'll talk about that later...gotta run and grab my shower..we have a bullet train at 7:30 to Hiroshima that we kinda can't miss!