Kyoto

Immediately after arriving in Kyoto, I met up with my friend, Maki, who is Chika's younger sister. Maki is 25 years old and lives in Kyoto. She works in a hospital taking care of people. Among other things, she likes rap music and alcohol. We had a lovely time strolling around Kyoto. First, we had lunch at a small shop in the Enmachi neighborhood and then headed for some temples.

Our first stop was Kinkaku-ji (temple). Kinkaku-ji is covered in gold paint. In 1950, a young man burned it down completely, wanting to commit suicide with it. He was arrested and he confessed. It was rebuilt. Recently, it was repainted.

The first photo at right is of Maki with Kinkaku-ji in the background. The second photo is both of us. Be sure to check out the links at the bottom for much better photos of Kinkaku-ji.

The next stop was the Kiyomizu Temple. Kiyomizu consists of many buildings, some of which are quite colorful. It was built in 798 A.D.. There is a beautiful park surrounding it. We spent a while walking around the area and just sitting and enjoying it.

After seeing the temples, we headed for an izakaya (traditional Japanese bar) for dinner and spirits. We settled at "Aira" which is in the Enmachi neighborhood of Kyoto. Like the other izakayas I went to, the food was delicious. The nice thing about izakayas is that the portions are relatively small so you can order a bunch of things for a reasonable amount of money. Below is our menu, which Maki kindly copied down for me.

• yakitori (grilled chicken)
• basashi (raw horse meat, served as sashimi)
• butanomoyashi (pork and bean sprouts ??)
• kushiyaki (don't remember)
• katsu no tataki (minced bonito)
• zen (Japanese whisky)
• warm sake

Seeing two of the beautiful temples in Kyoto does not even constitute scratching the surface. There are more than 2000 temples and shrines in Kyoto. Kyoto is definitely the cultural center of Japan. One could easily spend weeks sightseeing in Kyoto.

However, there were a lot of foreign tourists all over Kyoto. According to my Lonely Planet guidebook, Kyoto sees nearly 40 million tourists annually. In my stay in Japan, I particularly enjoyed my visits to smaller communities. So, I decided to make an unplanned visit to Hokkaido, the beautiful region in the northeast end of Japan.

I stayed the night at the Uno House, a very cheap guest house in Kyoto. I think it was ¥1650 (US $14.35) per night. There's a link to their home page below, but there are no photographs. It was definitely the dirtiest place I stayed in Japan, but I made a couple friends there, including Hitomi Nakamura. Hitomi and I really hit it off because she studied for a few months in Seattle and enjoyed her stay immensely. She is now a college student, 21 years old, in a college just outside of Kyoto. She speaks excellent English, too.

The next morning, as I was waiting for my train out of Kyoto, I saw this group of tourists taking photographs of the train, a Shinkansen. I believe there were five cameras all pointed at the same train. Sheesh. Tourists are annoying (myself excluded, of course).