Kyoto

Friday night me and Katie, I think is her name, decided we'd go to Kyoto in the morning. My roommate was gonna go but then he was meeting his host family that day and moving out. So it was just the two of us. She knows very little Japanese though.

So basically everything went just fine. We biked up to the station, got out tickets and hopped on a train. I asked someone before getting on the train if it was the right one, and I did choose the right one, luckily.

We got to Kyoto Station and explored a bit, and saw a live concert was going on in the station. That was interesting, and there were tons of people, so we just went up the escalators listening to the music. The escalators took us almost to the roof, where we could see out and over the whole city. its a pretty big place.

We just walked around aimlessly and found a temple, no admission fee that we could see, so we just walked in. It was mostly under renovation and restoration. it was cool though. They built a building around the larger of the temples so that as the worked on the roof nothing would be damaged by the weather. It was to be finished in 2011 i guess.

So we walked on down the road and randomly took a turn and just kept walking and found a small shrine hidden behind some buildings, we went in and looked around and there was a little old lady there that took care of the place. She said the shrine was 1500 years old and was dedicated to some local god. I forgot the name though.

Then we found the Otani memorial grounds. he was a buddist monk that was very influential in the area. It was a nice place for sure.

Then off up a random road, we found a graveyard that was just massive. I think i saw somewhere that it was 20 acres and 15,000 tombs. it was amazing really. It started to rain as we passed yet another small shrine. it was really cool though. it had a deck that over looked the city and there were murals on the ceiling that looked really really old.

We kept going up the hill and found that Kyomizudera was at the top of the hill. We sat and had some kakigori (shaved ice with fruit toping stuff) and then took a gander around the temple. Lasts tiem there was a really long line to drink the water, so I don't think we did it. So this time the line wasn't very long and we drank som of the spring watter that everyone wants to drink for some reason.

It tasted like water.

Since it was gettign dark we started home and found an Udon resterant. Udon is a Japanese noodle type dish like ramen, but udon is much better. :D it was delicious.

We started walking back and saw a line of people to get on a bus and thought, humm we should try using the bus. It was easier than i thought. You just get on and it is a flat rate in the city, 220 yen. and the bus had Kyoto Station written on the side. so we just go on and tried it. It was sooo packed! there wasn't room for another person to get on if they tried. it was amazingly fun.

I thought it would be much hard to find out train, but it was really easy in Kyoto station. everything has English everywhere, so no problem. We rode around randomly in downtown Hikone for a bit before going home for the night.

it was a good day. Pictures are posted on the photo site. http://picasaweb.google.com/dereck/Kyoto

Enjoy!