Hawaii and Japan, 2014 - Kyoto Gallery

Here is the gallery link for our second stop in Japan: Kyoto

https://plus.google.com/photos/112762354874316785091/albums/6098050751759273025

Hawaii and Japan, 2014 - 10/31 - Day 15 - Kyoto Castles and Copies

We started the day determined to have a sit-down breakfast, since for the last several days we've been going to bakeries in the morning and grabbing something doughy and fast. On the way to our first stop of the day, Nijo Castle, we found a breakfast diner called Hello and Goodbye which happily proclaimed that they featured American style breakfasts. Well alright then, Kyoto, show me what you've got. Unfortunately, what Hello and Goodbye had was a pretty bizarre take on an American breakfast - scrambled eggs with their whites and yolks more or less entirely seperate, toast with margarine (ick),  cabbage salad (no idea where this one came from), some pieces of deli-sliced turkey-ham, and some watery diner coffee. Ok, at least they got that last part more or less correct. We also got a piece of cheese cake because why not? The owner did seem a little confused about the fact that we ordered that along with the breakfasts, but he also uses cabbage slaw in his American breakfast, so I dont hold his opinion in the highest regard.

One of the resplendent gates at Nijo-jo

After we broke fast, we headed across the street to Nijo-jo, a castle originally built by the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1626. The castle keep suffered a series of disasters and was rebuilt twice since the original construction. Once in 1750, and then again in 1788. It is a large complex, parts of which were even imported from other castles during the original construction. The coolest part of Nijo-jo was the "nightingale floors" of the central building. They are built using special nails that shift in the supports when you walk across them, and they make a noise that sounds remarkably like the musical honks of a nightingale. I recorded it and I'll try to post the sound later when I have access to a program that will let me do that (I'm writing this from my iPad and there's not an elegant way to do it from here.)

Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion. Not quite as jazzed up
as its older twin.

From Nijo castle we took the bus out to the Philosopher's Walk, a stone pathway running along a canal on the western edge of Hirashiyama. It was given its name because a prominent professor at the University of Kyoto in the early 20th century used to frequent it. It connects several of the shrines and temples in the region and is lined with shops and food stalls. Apparently it is gorgeous in the Spring due to all the cherry trees that line the path, though I have only seen it in early Autumn and mid-Winter and it was pretty enough even then. We walked the path up to Ginkaku-ji, the silver pavilion, which is a less  spectacular version of its older twin, Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion. Kinkaku-ji was created by son of the creator of Ginkaku-ji, and he *did* have plans to foil the building in silver to match the gold of its twin, but a war got in the way of his plans and then he died, and well the whole silver part of the silver pavilion just never quite got around to happening. While that bit is a little disappointing, the best thing that Ginkaku-ji is its gorgeous grounds, which are even better than its older twin's, much lusher and more beautiful in every season.

After Ginkaku-ji we were a bit templed out, but we still wanted to see the Heian-in shinto shrine, if anything for its enormous tori gate. It was starting to rain by the time we got there, but we saw the gate, the grounds, and the shrine itself which were actually a bit disappointing after all the grandeur of the last few sites we had visited. Heian is in a bit dishevel compared to some of its comrads - the paint is starting to chip a bit, the wood is starting to look a little rough. It's probably due for some maintenance. After Heian we were pretty much spent on Kyoto shrines and ready to head out to our next destination, Nara. Nara is the pre-Kyoto capital of Japan, and since Kyoto was the capitol city for over 1000 years, we are talking the *old* old capitol. Of course, it isn't the *oldest* old old capitol, and was in fact the seat of the empire for only about 70 years, and its tiny compared to every other city we are visiting, but the little guy has a lot to offer. 

We took a local JR line train from Kyoto to Nara, which took about 45 minutes, and checked into our hotel, the Nara Nikko, which is literally attached to the train station. It was late enough that all we really wanted to do was get something to eat and relax for the rest of the day, so we walked around the corner to a restaurant highly rated on Trip Advisor, a seafood restaurant called, wait for it, Uosen Suisan Sakanaya Dojo Nara Sanjo-dori... or at least that's how it is listed on Trip Advisor. There is no English signage at the restaurant.

Big Sashimi bowl at Uosen Suisan. They
give you the head and tail to prove how fresh
it is, then fry the bones up for you as crackers.

We sat down, our waitress brought us some chopsticks and then promptly disappeared. We ruminated over the all-Japanese menu for several minutes and she hadn't returned...many more minutes passed and I was beginning to think that we were receiving the unwanted tourist treatment, then the Japanese couple next to us asked us in pretty good English whether we needed help ordering, and we discovered that you had to *summon* the waiter with a big red button that was sitting on the table the entire time. It was definitely an embarrassing stupid tourist moment, but lucky for us, our discomfort and disquiet at being ignored made us some friends, as the couple chatted with us for most of our meal about cultural differences, why we were in Japan, what we did, and all that. And once we actually figured out how to order, the restaurant really did have some great food. The sashimi was super fresh, the takoyaki was much better than the stuff I had in Tokyo, and we got to try some new things including a mixed grill of chicken yakitori (including skin and gristle, which were both actually pretty good), and a dish typically made by fishermen called Sangayaki, which although tiny, was also good - sort of like a small tuna casserole without the noodles. Maybe it was the several drinks we had, but we were very chatty with our new friends, and it was a nice evening. We payed for it a bit the next morning when we were supposed to be up and touring Nara, and were instead oversleeping with hangovers. But that's for tomorrow!

Hawaii and Japan, 2014 - 10/30 - Day 14 - Golden Temples, Zen Gardens, Imperial Houses, and Some Manga

That view of Kinkaku-ji that everyone has a shot of.

There are a few temples in the Kyoto area that are sort of out of the way of the rest of the scene, and one of them is a near-critical visit - Kinkaku-ji temple, the golden pavilion, was originally a retirement villa for a Shogun (well, according to a Spanish tour guide we eavesdropped on, it was originally a small village which was then 'appropriated' by the shogunate into a retirement villa.) His son converted it into a Buddhist temple after his father's death. Like most extremely old buildings (this one dates back to 1397) Kinkaku-ji was once burned to the ground and a new one was constructed in 1955. It was faithfully reconstructed aside from the fact that the new architects thought it needed a little more bling, so instead of just the top floor of the pavilion being leafed in gold they just went ahead and did the whole shebang, inside and out. The inside is sadly inaccessible to the public, but we did see some photos.

We took a peaceful stroll along with several thousand other tourists through the grounds of Kinkaku-ji. There was a little tea house here where we stopped and had some matcha. Neither of us are particularly fond of matcha, but the novelty of the idea of having some tea at a temple struck us, so we went ahead with it anyway. Having lightly refueled, we exited the grounds to walk a mile to the other out-of-the-way sight in northwest Kyoto, Ryoan-ji.

Ryoan-ji is a temple complex of the Rinzai school, and the zen garden there, with its fifteen perfectly positioned rocks amidst a field of combed pebbles, is a famous icon of Kyoto. The zen garden is surprisingly small, and you view it from a platform within the main temple building, so you can't get particularly close to it. The grounds of the complex were almost more striking than the zen garden itself, with a large lake surrounded by maple trees and copses of spruce and willow. 

Kyoto Imperial Palace main building

A 25 minute bus ride returned us to the area near our apartment, which also happens to be the location of the old Imperial castle. Kyoto Imperial Palace was the seat of the emperor of Japan for upwards of 1000 years before it was moved to Tokyo in the later part of the 19th century. In one of those the serendipitous travel coincidences that sometimes occur, we had come to visit the Imperial Palace on the first open day of the Fall season, which means we didn't have to go apply to get access to the palace area, it was open to everyone. On the one hand, cool, we didn't have to show our passports and fill out paperwork to get in. On the other, there was a swarm of tourists who all wanted in on the first open day, so we shared the experience with the unwashed masses. The grounds of the Imperial Palace are expansive, and the inner gardens and buildings are impressive as well. It occurs to me as a write this that my readers are probably tired of hearing "impressive" and "beautiful" as descriptors for everything in Kyoto...but seriously, I'd be spending a lot of time with a thesaurus trying to come up with unique adjectives for the same effect. Everything is just freaking amazing, ok? Go see it.

After the Imperial Palace, we had a hankerin' for some noodles. It so happened that we were in the apartment's neighborhood, and we had a pretty thorough food recommendation list for the area from our host. It also so happened that our host's wife's family runs a noodle shop in the area. Oh cool, we thought, we can visit a little cafe run by locals. It turns out that our host's wife's family runs are pretty epic Kyoto institutional restaurant called Honke Owariya, which has been around for more than 500 years and has four locations in the Kyoto area.

Rikyu Soba with fried gluten cakes

We dined upon Nishin-boni, smoked herring filets simmered in sweet soy. Sean had the house soup with soba noodles, leeks and a poached egg, and I had Rikyu soba, made with fried wheat gluten cakes, yuzu citrus peel and the same house broth. For dessert, Sean had Tokoro Ten, which are glass-like jelly noodles that are more or less flavorless, but in this case served with sweet vinegar and, of all things, spicy yellow mustard. I had warabi-mochi, which are sweet dumplings made from bracken root and dusted with roasted buckwheat. The dumplings were pretty much like mochi, but the buckwheat dust had a sort of unpleasant gritty mouth feel. Eh, at least I tried it.

A few blocks away from the restaurant was the Kyoto International Manga museum, our next stop. Aside from informative exhibits about what Manga *is*, the museum is a living repository of manga books, and seemed more useful as a place one holds a membership and goes to as a library. There were 3 floors of manga, mostly in Japanese but several in other languages as well, in the extensive collection. There was also a gallery for a new anime that is going to be released in January of 2015 called "Fleet Girls" which judging from the illustrations and the short promo video, is light on story and big on hot chicks with guns and anchors and fighter planes attached to them in various ways. We weren't that impressed with 'Fleet Girls'.

Afterward, we returned to the apartment for a few minutes, then went out to downtown Kyoto, where we walked around the shops. We were originally going to Nishiki market, which is a food and kitchen supply area, but it closed at 5 o'clock, so the whole place was forbidding metal rolling doors and unlit signs. Right around the corner though was the main shopping district, and we walked through there for about an hour and a half before losing steam. Our last gasp of the day was to visit a Japanese bookstore, where we headed immediately to the ages 0-3 section. Sean picked up a book about a little girl going on her first errand, to get some milk for her mother, and on our way out we saw the Japanese version of the first Harry Potter book, so I bought that to add to the many other versions of Harry Potter I have in my library at home.

On our way back to the apartment we got some take-out from a crappy little fast-food place called Hotto Motto, where I got a Japanese curry with tonkatsu, and Sean had a fried chicken donburri rice bowl. Tomorrow we check out of our apartment in Kyoto. We will spend most of the day trying to see some of the things we missed over the last few days, and then we'll head over to Nara for a taste of ever older Japan.

Hawaii and Japan, 2014 - 10/29 - Day 13 - Kyoto Temple Run, Part 1

Breakfast at the Ryokan

Breakfast at the Ryokan was another impressive affair, served in our rooms by our private attendant. There was smoked grilled fish, tea with salted apricot (a tradition of the ryokan), little baby whole sardines with grated radish, pickled vegetables, miso soup, and a citrus scented chawanmushi, which is a type of mild egg custard.
After we checked out of the Ryokan we took the subway to the airBnB where we'll spend the last few nights of our stay in Kyoto.  The place we are staying appears to be a converted office building. It's a studio with a relatively large living space and a big Turkish looking tent over the beds. The host calls this room the "cocoon room." Very arty.
After re-settling in our new place, we decided to have a light lunch by heading to a bakery nearby. We bought some various pastry filled with various things, and then went out to discover how to use the bus system in Kyoto. It turned out to be relatively simple - if one is planning to use the bus more than twice, it behooves the person to buy a day bus pass, which allows them to hop on and off the bus any number of times over the course of a single day. You buy the bus passes at local convenience stores.
Half the day was already burned, but we headed out to Southern Higashiyama, the district in Kyoto with the highest concentration of tourist attractions. This is the primary Kyoto Temple run. The whole thing is about 11 kilometers of walking through hilly and often winding stone roads and walkways, but we only did half of it today, starting at the southernmost attraction, Kiyomizu-dera.
Kiyomizu-dera means 'pure water temple' and is a large Buddhist temple built atop a mountain spring. It is impressive not only because of its size, but due to the nature of the construction of the temple. which is partially built out onto large scaffolding overlooking the spring itself. Part of the temple was sadly under construction, so it wasn't as striking as it could have been, with half of the buildings covered with construction tarps.

Love Shrine at Kiyumizu Dera

One of the must-do's at Kiyumizu is to walk the Tainai-meguri path, a pitch-black walkway under the shrine with a beaded line that you have to hold onto to keep from getting hopelessly lost in the darkness. The path is a symbolic rebirth through the birthing bits of Daizuigu Bosatsu, a Bodhisattva who grants wishes. You wander down the dark canal, leaving your physical form behind you, enter into a dimly lit alcove where a spinning stone sits, presumably representing your new, soon-to-be-reborn egg-self. You touch the egg, wish for something hopefully less shallow than a new car or a puppy or whatever, and then continue to follow the line and are reborn into the world, bursting forth into new light and life.
Yeah, that's what was supposed to happen. What ended up happening for me is I got halfway down the proverbial vagina, touched the stone, got totally disoriented and wound up working my way back up the wrong passage and getting almost totally back to the beginning before realizing what I was doing was against the natural flow...coincidence? I suspect not, Bodhisattva.
Anyway, we made our way through the symbolic vagina eventually, and wandered about the temple grounds some more, stopping at the true love shrine where lovers come to pray for strong relationships, and skipped out on drinking the purifying waters of the spring because there was a huge line, and we were pretty sure that even if the spring water was pure, those cups everyone was using to drink from it had a cumulative million lips upon them that day alone.

A stroll down Ishibei-koji

Once again, in an effort to summarize, I'm not going to talk about everything we did today. It was a long walk and we saw so many gorgeous temples and shrines it's difficult to separate them in my head. We saw a huge necropolis, a gorgeous old Kyoto street called Ishibei-koji, the shrine of a wealthy family called Kodai-ji, which we caught right at the magic hour and I practically burned out my camera taking pictures. We walked through some parks, ate ice cream with yuzu marmalade, and I was just thoroughly re-enchanted with the Kyoto shrine district. It really is something special.
That night we returned to Gion, to a restaurant called Gion Manzara, which is a bar that also serves food called izakaya, which is a lot like Japanese tapas, food made to be eaten while drinking. They make their own sake at Gion Manzara, and we consumed much of it, all the while enjoying various dishes like stewed simmered pumpkin, boiled eel with sansho leaves, sashimi style seared wagyu, and my first taste of fresh matsutake mushrooms, the flavor of which, to be honest, was a little like wet paper. I mean there was a layer of complexity to it that was enjoyable...I just wish the water paper taste was a little less pronounced.
I actually had a moral dilemma at the restaurant, possibly one of my first when deciding whether I was going to order something. They had whale sashimi on the menu, and whale is one of those things that you're not likely to come across very often. There *are* sustainable and 'reasonably' ethical whale hunting practices out there, but it was impossible to know how this particular whale was fished, so I opted out of trying it. As much as I love trying new things, I guess I have some lines, and I've had it drilled into me for a so long that whale fishing is brutal and horrible, that it's hard to separate that from the experience of eating it. So no whale for now. Maybe some day the opportunity will arise for me to try some that I know has been fished ethically...or as ethically as anything else in that vein.
Tomorrow we try to finish the temple run and check out central Kyoto and the Imperial palace as well. We've got all of today and part of tomorrow to wind up Kyoto. To be honest I wish he had at least another day here, but we didn't want to miss Nara and Osaka, so sacrifices had to be made. Anyway, onward!

Hawaii and Japan, 2014 - 10/28 - Day 12 - In Shinkansen and Onsen

The Nozomi line is the fastest of the Shinkansen,
for the time being...

Today we left the comfort of our Tokyo home away from home and headed off to Kyoto via the Shinkansen bullet train. We used the Nozomi line, the fastest of the three Shinkansen varieties, which had us to Kyoto in about two hours of zooming through the Kansai landscape, which shifted from city to hills, to mountains, and then eventually back to city.
Kyoto is tiny compared to Tokyo; there are only about 1.5 million people in the city, but the fun part about Kyoto is the juxtaposition of old and new that you see everywhere. I'll elucidate more tomorrow, when we actually tour the city more thoroughly.
For now, we exited Kyoto station and stored our bags in lockers outside the station, then proceeded to Kyoto Tower to get a bird's eye view of the area and get our bearings. Kyoto Tower is a very 1960's spaceship-like structure atop the Kyoto Hotel. It was designed for the 1964 Summer Olympics, though didn't actually complete construction until late that year, and has been a controversial point in modern Kyoto history ever since. It certainly feels out of place in the city of shrines, but it does provide a nice view, and one can even see the city of Osaka in the southwestern distance from the top.
We had lunch at one of the restaurants in Osaka station, part of the restaurant section called "EAT PARADISE." The actual restaurant we ate at was called 'Sarai' and it served varieties of Okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki is a dish made popular in the Osaka area and its name translates to "grilled whatever you want." It's like a giant pancake made with rice flour, grated yam, dashi, eggs and lots of cabbage, then topped with bacon or squid or "whatever you want." Different varieties top that off with different types of sauces.
I had a Kyotenyaki, which is a variety topped with mayonnaise and radish sprouts - the salad pizza of Okonomiyaki, and Sean had a Negiyaki, which was more omelette style with lots of fried leeks. We also had some thin friend tofu pieces. The tofu in Kyoto is very renowned. They attribute its quality to the water in the area, which is very rich in minerals, hence all the onsens.

Room in Ryokan Seikoro in Kyoto

Speaking of onsens, the main attraction of the day was that we stayed in a ryokan! A ryokan is a traditional Japanese inns that became popular in the Edo period. Ryokans feature tatami-mat rooms, public, a usually gender separated ofuro (bath) and all the sliding rice paper doors and yukatas one could ever wish for. You go to a ryokan for service, which is top notch. Meals are served to you privately in your rooms, and at least once dinner consists of the famous kaiseki dining experience.
Before we settled into our elaborate dinner, we had a few hours to burn, so we decided to take a night stroll around the Gion neighborhood. Gion is the old entertainment district, and it is where the geisha tradition is still at its strongest. Geisha are female performers, they are artists and dancers and entertainers formost, and they are very respected in the area. Kyoto is the only area of Japan where Geisha training is allowed to begin before the age of eighteen, and some geisha begin their training as early as 15.
We walked around Gion, taking in the architecture, the lighting, the mix of locals and vacationers, then we took a shortcut through the Kenin-ji temple grounds to get home. Walking through the grounds at night was pretty cool. It was very satisfying seeing the old temple roofs illuminated by moonlight. On our way back we also discovered a museum dedicated to Ukiyo, or "floating world" paintings. We didn't go in, but the sign on the door said something like "Opens when I wake up, closes when I have to sleep. Sometimes I shut the doors when I've had enough." Charming.
After we returned to the ryokan we gave the baths our first go. Like I said, the baths at an onsen are communal, and any kind of bathing suit is strictly forbidden as the Japanese people consider this to be dirtying the purity of the water. The process is to shower before getting in, soak for a while, shower again, resoak, and then dry off. The water is usually wicked hot, around 110-115 degrees, though this particular one wasn't too bad. We had a nice soak, then returned to our rooms for the main event of the evening - kaiseki.

Kaiseki with nine courses at Ryokan Seikoro

Are you comfortable? I'm going to talk a little bit about kaiseki. Modern kaiseki is a fusion of four Japanese cuisine traditions: imperial court cuisine, Buddhist temple cuisine samurai cuisine and the tea ceremony, which originates in the 15th century. It is a style of serving small individual dishes over several courses, each carefully balanced and seasonally sourced. The kaiseki provided by our Ryokan, Seikoro, was ten dishes (plus lots of little pickled things all over the place. I won't describe each course here, but there was a salad, a sort of...antipasto, a sashimi plate, a soup, a grilled fish course, a consumme, a sweet and sour seafood dish, a tempura set, a third soup, and a dessert. The collage of all the courses (not including the comsumme, which I ate without remember to take a picture), is around here somewhere. Everything was wonderful, and its been the highlight of the trip for me so far.
After dinner, it is appropriate to have a second soak in the baths which the staff prepare your room for the evening, by removing the table and placing out the futons. I had never slept in a true ground-level futon before, certainly not on a tatami mat floor. I was expecting to be quite uncomfortable, but aside from the temperature of the room being a little cold (our fault really, the heaters were very strong and we didn't want to run them), it was actually a pretty comfortable night's sleep.
Tomorrow is our first walking day in Kyoto, and it's going to be a long one. We're planning on checking in at our airBnB around 11:00, then doing as much of sight-seeing of the southern part of town as we can. Stay tuned.

Last Day in Kyoto

We woke up on the sixth feeling no worse for wear from the previous day’s rigors. We were scheduled to catch the Shinkansen at 2:00 back to Tokyo, but we had the whole morning to wrap up our Kyoto experience, so we packed up our backpacks and set out on foot to our first stop,

Higashi-Hongan-Ji, a temple with a large central building and a secondary shrine whose exterior was under construction. One of the central attractions of this shrine was supposed to be a large length of rope made entirely of human hair, which I suppose sounds sort of gross now that I think of it. Anyway, we didn’t get to see it, as that section of the temple was under construction. We did get to see some really nice golden friezes depicting Bodhisatvas. There was quite a few golden artifacts in this temple.

The next temple on our trek was Nishi-Hongan-ji, which sported a bigger complex, but to be perfectly frank, by this point in our Kyoto journey, we were all a little jaded on big temple complexes. I mean, we’d seen “the biggest bell”, “the biggest gate”, “the most golden”. What else could they throw at us that would be that impressive?

Well the last temple we visited was To-ji, which has – wait for it – “Japan’s largest Pagoda.” It is five levels, and very impressive. It’s not particularly flashy, but it is big. After the pagoda we went into some of the auxillary buildings, which held some priceless statues which were cooler than the actual pagoda, I think. Sadly we weren’t allowed to take photos of them. Afterwards we walked back to the train station, which actually turned out to be more impressive than we had initially thought. We ate lunch at a ramen shop on the 10^th floor of the station complex then boarded the Shinkansen, which arrived precisely at the time on our tickets, and left 1 minute later.

On the return trip to Tokyo we passed through several towns and at least three climates. At one point, we entered a tunnel, which lasted all of about 10 seconds, and when we exited into a snow storm. We entered another tunnel 5 minutes later, and boom, no more snow. The highlight of the return trip, and something we didn’t manage to catch on the first Shinkansen trip, was seeing Mt. Fuji in all its snow-capped glory. Phil and Dustin snapped some pictures of it, so I’ll get those from him when we get back to the states.

When we got back to Tokyo, we took the subway back to the hotel and met back up with the rest of the group. Everyone was pretty tired, so we decided to stick around Shinjuku for the evening. We went out to the Lumine mall to a restaurant there that served mystery food on sticks. We all ate our fill, including grilled cherry tomatoes, chicken, heart, and liver (which was especially good). I also had a cucumber and ume plum salad that was really good. All of us had lots and lots of sake here. Dustin was completely plastered and the rest of us weren’t too far behind. We managed to walk most of it off on the trip back to the hotel though, where we promptly drank some more sake. Then we slept. Dustin promises I didn’t snore this time.

Kyoto: The City of Shrines

Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday wishes. They were received, and appreciated. I woke up at 5am feeling pretty good on my 30^th birthday. Dustin, Phil and I were scheduled to catch the Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo station at 7am and wanted to give ourselves ample time in case anything were to go not-so-according-to-plan on our way there. Things, it turns out, went not-so-according-to-plan almost right off the bat as we left the hotel to discover all of the auxiliary subway stops were closed at that time of the morning. So we had to hoof it to the main Shinjuku station entrance above ground instead of taking the nice, warm, slightly more direct tunnels. When we got to the station, we could not find the line we planned on taking to Tokyo station, the Marunuchi line. It turns out that line was almost all the way back towards our hotel just inside one of those closed auxiliary entrances. Luckily Phil has become some sort of Tokyo subway samurai, and got us onto another line which got us there in just about the same amount of time it would have taken on the other line. We got to Tokyo station with time to spare and snagged some breakfast at a convenience store while waiting for the train.

The Shinkansen is the fastest train in the world, and visually it accepts the challenge by looking like a gleaming white ground-based space shuttle. The Hidari line runs at an average of 270 kph from Tokyo to Shin-Osaka, and stops for about 1 minute in Kyoto. The ride was a little under 3 hours long, and is a very good length for writing blog entries…

Kyoto, on a large scale, is not as awe-inspiring as Tokyo. It’s sort of a brown city, mixing old style Japanese buildings and Sky rises, without the glamour and bustle of Tokyo. The joy of Kyoto comes from the sheer number of shrines and monuments. These hidden treasures pepper Kyoto but are often difficult to catch from a glance at the skyline.

The two easily spotted landmarks are the Kyoto Tower, an absolutely horrible piece of modern architecture that scars the city line. It looks like the Space Needle in Seattle, only much much uglier. The other noteworthy skyline feature is the To-ji pagoda, the largest in Japan, which we did in fact visit. But more on that later.

Day 1 in Kyoto started with a taxi ride to the north side of Kyoto to see its most spectacular shrine, Kinkaku-ji, the golden shrine. This moniker is not just a flashy title. The shrine at Kinkaku-ji is made of gold. We arrived at the temple with the perfect lighting conditions, and the shrine was glowing from the sunlight, creating a magnificent reflection in the pool below it. We circled the shrine along a path through the manicured grounds (there were at least two monks sweeping the forest at the entrance, I kid you not), then left that temple and caught a taxi back into central Kyoto for our next stop, Nijo-jo.

Nijo-jo is a castle that the Shogunate created in the 17^th century when the military and the emperor were rattling sabers at each other. They say in the brochure that it is bigger and better appointed than the actual Imperial Palace at Kyoto, which is not open to the public at any time. It is a very large complex, with intricate gardens, ponds, and is home to various giant koi and some huge king herons, who more or less ignored our presence. The gardens are supposed to be extra impressive during the spring, when the cherry and plum blossoms are fully in bloom.

Unfortunately we picked the wrong day to visit the castle, as the actual interior space of the castle proper, which is supposed to be pretty impressive, was closed for New Years. It was going to be open the next day, but we had already paid admission before we discovered this, and as you’ll see in the next blog post, January 5^th was a very long day, even without the castle.

After Nijo castle we walked into downtown Kyoto and checked into our hotel. We’d been carrying our small day-trip bags through the sites thus far, so it was nice to unload our crap and sit for a few minutes before heading out again.

The first stop after our hotel intermission was the Kyoto food market. We managed to stay our wallets and stomachs, knowing that that evening we had a special meal planned, but let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. There was a smorgasbord of food vendors selling everything from mochi cakes to roasted chestnuts to fried tofu on a stick. The crowds were big, but nowhere near the throngs of the Tokyo streets.

As the afternoon progressed we made our way to Gion, the Geisha district, which straddles the Kyoto quay at the river. Gion is representative of the old style of Japanese apartments, and is also the neighborhood where the Geishas used to ply their trade heavily, pre-World War II. Many of the shops were still closed for New Years, but as the sun went down, we managed to get a pretty decent impression of the neighborhood. We even managed to spy one geisha in a tea shop, serving her clients with the traditional demur of her training.

Our last stop of the evening was a restaurant very near Yasaka-jinju, one of the shrines we would visit on the following day. The restaurant specializes in a popular style of Kyoto cuisine called Kaiseki, which is an eighteen course meal that usually accompanies the traditional tea ceremony. It turns out that to experience the true full Kaiseki we needed to make reservations (thanks for dropping the ball on that one, Rough Guides) but we were allowed to have a shortened version that ended up being more food than we could eat anyway. We started the meal by removing our shoes and awkwardly attempting to sit in the kneeling position customary in that style of restaurant. Having not practiced sitting in that way since childhood like the Japanese guests that frequent the restaurant, we were squirming within minutes and had to settle for the less elegant cross-legged alternative. The highlight of the meal came early on, with the restaurants specialty of tea-soaked dried cod and yam. It was profoundly good. The fish had a unique and complex flavor, and the bones were so tender after the drying and reconstituting, that you could eat them along with the fish without even noticing them. The rest of the meal consisted of tempura, tofu sashimi, mocha rolls, three kinds of soups and some other dishes I can’t even remember at this point. It was definitely an unforgettable birthday dinner.

Afterward we bought some sake and beer and waddled back to the hotel room where we rested for the next day, which I would like to call “Shrine-a-thon 2010.”