Day 19 (S)

Today we made our first excursion into Kyoto! It was lots of fun, but unbearably hot. I hate humidity. 

First we went to Kiyomizu-dera, which is my favorite temple so far, probably my favorite tourist visit so far too (not counting the aquarium). It is a rather large complex with lots of little shrines and nice grounds.

 I bought lots of Omamori there. Myra and I both tried Omikuji, which is a form of fortune telling; first we shook a little barrel container and dumped out a stick with a number on it, then the monk gave us a little piece of paper from the stack with our number and that told us what sort of luck we had.

I got the highest luck on the list, Myra got the second lowest. So to dispel her bad luck, Myra tied her fortune to the little sticky frame thing where you tie your fortune to dispel the bad luck.

Then we went to lunch at this cool little soba shop with expensive noodles:

Then we set off for Kinkakuji, doing lots of stopping at shops on the way. We didn’t actually buy that much, just did lots of window shopping.

To get too Kinkakuji, we caught a bus near Kiyomizu-dera and rode it to Kyoto station (which is huge), and then swapped to a different bus. About 20 minutes into the second bus, someone finally noticed that we had left Skye behind somewhere (Kyoto station it turned out). Luckily, the Japanese students took care of finding him and we were happily reunited at Kinkakuji right before it closed. So we toured the temple grounds twice. Here is a picture of the only important part of the grounds:

Then we caught a bus, most of the group left us, and the three of us + Kazu and Ben went to Gion, where we saw a cool temple (for free)

then to a yakitori restaurant. It was interesting, but expensive and very slow service. We had planned to find the historic section of Gion, but because the food took so long, we ended up just heading back to the dorms. We were 20 minutes to late to catch the las bus, so we walked back to the dorms. I am beginning to hate the walk back, since we seem to only do it out of necessity.

Here is a vending machine at the bus stop in Kyoto:

(it has neckties, batteries, and camera memory cards)

It was a successful day :)