Day 1: New York
Day 2: Japan Airlines first class
Day 3: Kyoto
Day 4: Kyoto Day 5: Kyoto & Osaka Day 6: Osaka & Nara Day 7: Nara Day 8: Nara & Tokyo Day 9: Tokyo Day 10: Tokyo
Day 11: Flight back to New York
Day 3: Kyoto
Bridge at Heian Shrine
We woke up to get our first glimpse of Japan in the daytime, and made our way to our first temples, learning for the first time how to fight the scourge of Kyoto sidewalks: Bicycles. People including myself will rhapsodize about how organized and efficient Japan’s transportation infrastructure is. This is true in all modes of transportation except bicycles. For whatever reason, the Japanese, especially in Kyoto, are totally comfortable riding bicycles on already narrow sidewalks. This introduces an element of complete chaos for pedestrians. I was pretty amazed that this was acceptable, because even in America people know better than to ride on the sidewalk. Bizarre.
Our first stop was the Heian Shrine. This is a Shinto shrine near the center of Kyoto. It was early in the morning and there were several people cleaning up the grounds. The gravel had also been combed, and it was so neat, I felt bad walking on it.
I’m just going to dance around the fact that I don’t know much about Shintoism or Buddhism and so I didn’t really know what I was looking at most of these temples. Just gotta be honest on this one. At the entrance there is usually a wide fountain where people will scoop water over their hands with little wooden cups. Then at the shrine entrance, people will clap once or twice before, I imagine, saying a prayer. This was all new to me. 
The Heian Shrine had a few visitors on the main grounds, which are free to enter, but we also paid to enter the gardens, which seem to take up the bulk of the property. It was super peaceful, even being in the center of Kyoto. This was our first time seeing Japan’s famously well-manicured gardens.
It seemed like there were people constantly walking around, picking up fallen leaves, trimming branches and just doing upkeep around these gardens. Here’s a guy out in the lake on a ladder so he can reach some bushes on the water side.
After Heian, we made our way to the smaller Okazaki Shrine. We were mostly going to every shrine and temple on the tourist map our AirB&B had, so we didn’t know what each one was going to be like. But he Okasaki Shrine was all about rabbits!
There weren’t any real rabbits here, but there were rabbit designs and statues everywhere. I guess the rabbit is a symbol of fertility (for obvious reasons) so people go here for good luck in that regard. But for us, the rabbit is just a symbol of cuteness, or kawaii if you like. Pray to your rabbit kami, heathens!
Rabbit plaques with wishes written on the back
After Okazaki, we walked up the hills into the eastern part of the city where a number of the more visited shrines are located. First was Ginkaku-ji, which we reached after walking through some quiet neighborhoods. I knew we had arrived there when we came upon a tour bus and a bunch of obvious tourists. I just don’t get the tour bus thing. I guess a lot of people wouldn’t be as embarrassed as I would be riding one from place to place.
Ginkaku-ji was actually planned as a retirement home a long time ago, and was turned into a Zen temple. The centerpiece of the extensive gardens is this giant, perfectly shaped pile of sand. Don’t you just want to punch it?
There were workers here cleaning up, too. This guy was picking up errant branches and stuffing them in his pockets.
After Ginkaku-ji we made our way south and visited Anraku-ji, a much less-visited site than Ginkaku-ji. I guess the tour bus doesn’t stop here. This one had a few nice stone paths and lots of moss.
Anraku-ji
There was also an attached graveyard with what looked like snow skis for headstones. I’m not quite sure what that’s all about, but some are newer than others. Check out the perfectly round stone.
After Anraku-ji, we were hungry.We stumbled on a place that we could tell was a restaurant, even though all the signs were in Japanese. How can you tell a restaurant in Japan?
But was it open? We waited until another non-Japanese family entered before going in ourselves. I learned that the restaurant was called Okonomiyaki Zen and the dishes you’re looking at are okonomiyaki, a sort of egg-based pancake with filling. We had beef and seafood, I think:
Each table has a hot plate in the middle, and the waitress (there were two old ladies running the whole operation) basically brought your order out raw and dumped it on the plate to cook, turning it every once in a while. Then it gets topped with shredded seaweed, bonito flakes and okonomiyaki sauce. Yes, it has its own sweet, savory sauce. This was all really good.
Filled with okonomiyaki goodness, we walked to Nanzen-ji, a temple with an enormous entry gate which was so big I apparently forgot to take a photo of it. The most unique part of Nanzen-ji was the huge, old brick aqueduct which still had water running through it.
After Nanzen-ji, we made the long walk to the last temple of the day, the famous Kiyomizu. Kiyomizu was busy. So busy that it was difficult to enjoy. This was just a Tuesday, but it was crowded with school and tour groups. 
The main temple is a gigantic wooden structure. You can see it crowded with people here. There are shrines around the property prominently painted in the typical vermillion orange.
Kiyomizu detail
I’m looking through my notes and photos trying to remember what we had for dinner, and I’m not seeing anything, so possibly that okonomiyaki filled us up for the rest of the day! Well, aside from the inevitable convenience store snacks and ubiquitous vending machine drinks. After all, when in Japan…
In Japan, Tommy Lee Jones is known as the Coffee Boss.
Day 4: Kyoto
Wednesday morning we took the convenient train out to western Kyoto, the Arashiyama district. It was quiet in the morning, but did prove to be rather touristy by 12:00. The main draws out in Arashiyama are the Tenryu-ji temple and the bamboo forest.
Before that, we stumbled on a used kimono store. Marge had wanted to buy a kimono while in Japan, and I said there were used kimono shops where you could probably find one cheap. Well, I was right! For fun’s sake, here’s the place on Google StreetView.
Tenryu-ji is a pretty modest Buddhist temple inside. All tatami mats and sliding doors. The bigger draw is the gardens, which I think were the best of any we visited. Most people were outside, sitting and gazing over the pond.
Not far from Tenryu-ji is the bamboo forest. Sure, I’ve seen so forests in my day, they’re absolutely boring. But this was a bamboo forest. I’ve never seen that!
The neat thing about a bamboo forest is that it just takes a slight breeze to get the trees moving and knocking their leaves and hollow trunks against each other. So this forest not only looks different, but it has a different sound from any old deciduous forest.
Arashiyama Bamboo Forest
We managed to walk through some odd neighborhood back to the train station to go back to downtown Kyoto. But on our way back, we stopped at Nijo Castle for a short visit. Tourist attractions are so reasonably priced in Japan, we didn’t feel bad about paying for just an hour long visit. Normally, we’re the people who spend hours in a museum, but we were hungry, probably because we had already spent too long in Arashiyama.
Entrance to Nijo Castle
Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over 1,000 years. This castle was built as the emperor’s palace in the 1600’s. Aside from the extensive gardens and fancy gates, it’s still very modest and plain inside. Compare that to the palaces built in Europe at the same time!
One area where they didn’t spare any expense, though, was the moat. There’s two of them circling the property!
Nijo Castle moat
We got back on the subway and headed to the museum area of Kyoto to look for something to eat before getting in one more museum for the day. We walked down some of the canal-side alleys to get there. Finding a cheap restaurant that was open around 3:00 wasn’t easy, but we made one brilliant discovery. I seemed to remember faintly something about Japanese loving… food at 7-11.
For you, tourist, 7-11 is your friend in Japan. 7-11 could be your lifeline! Fresh food that’s much cheaper than it has any right to be. Check out that rice with salmon, seaweed, and green onions. And the onigiri. Man, how I wish we had good onigiri in every convenience store in America.
Within about a four block area, there are a couple of Kyoto’s biggest museums: the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art. But we skipped those and went to the Handicrafts museum, since that includes all of the crafts local to Japan, and those other museums contain a lot of international art. And what’s the point of that?
Two past eras
I recommend you do the same, fellow tourist. The handicraft museum was hard to find. It was in a conference center-looking building, in the basement, but there was a great variety of crafts. And weirdly, a lot of it was for sale.
We went back to the inn and had a rest. Marge tried on her kimono, and we headed out later that night for dinner. We were in the heart of the Gion, the geisha district, and there were a lot of dark alleys with expensive restaurants with only Japanese menus. That left us foreigners in the dark. We ended up sheepishly eating at a sushi restaurant that loudly declared its “English menu!” – Yatai Sushi
That said, it was still good. Look at that! Yummy fish flesh!
We got a good night’s sleep in our two twin sized cots pushed together as if they were one bed, which was important because I wanted to get up early in the morning.
Thursday morning I went to one of the two places that were my must-do’s. What was that place? Stay tuned!