We decided to focus our first day of sightseeing on the northwestern part of Kyoto. But first we started with lunch at my new favorite restaurant, Jolly Pasta. (My dad asked me the other day if I was learning to like Japanese food. My honest answer was “No, but I like Italian food, and the Japanese do a pretty good job with Italian food” (if you’re careful not to get the dishes they’ve “enhanced” with fish eggs or squid ink or god knows what else.)) So we feasted on pasta and garlic bread and pizza and Pepsi and tiramisu before starting our sightseeing.
Our first stop was the famous Golden Temple. It was beautiful, but packed, as we were soon to discover all of Kyoto was. The story behind the Golden Temple is that is was originally a retirement villa for a Shogun (who wouldn’t like to retire here!). After his death, it was converted into a temple. Then in 1950, a Buddhist monk “consummated his obsession with the temple by burning it to the ground”. Talk about devotion! It was rebuilt in all its splendor.
The next stop was Ryoanji Temple which had a rock garden. Somehow Karen and I managed to completely miss the rock garden (I think we were avoiding the big crowd of people taking off their shoes to enter a building) and were nearly out the exit when we realized our error. We turned around and joined the shoeless people in the building and found the rock garden. The garden was lovely, but I discovered another quirk of the Japanese people. They do not push to get into a bus or train. Instead they make a nice orderly line to get on. But put them in a Zen Buddhist temple in sightseeing mode and they are as pushy as Americans at the mall on Christmas Eve! Karen managed to find a nice spot to appreciate the garden, but I snapped my photos of it and moved onto to a quieter spot in the temple. Needless to say, I was not feeling the “zen” of the temple.
Ninnaji Temple was our last site for the day, and we reached it with just an hour to spare before dusk. It was a huge temple complex, and we were so lucky to witness a group of monks praying. Here’s a short clip of the video I filmed of them. The guy closest to the camera would clap two pieces of wood together when it was time for them to finish a chant. It was fascinating to see!
We returned to Himeji for the night where I took a photo of this – a guy selling octopus dumplings and beer out of the back of a van!
We returned to Kyoto on Sunday to focus our attention on the area near Gion. We started at the Heian-jingu shrine. This was one of the shrines I saw the previous weekend but didn’t have time to see the garden. The garden was lovely (my new favorite word, along with “divine”, both picked up from Suvanya’s South African English) and had a Chinese inspired bridge, as well as this footbridge with its warning sign.
Lots of Japanese children like to pose for photos standing on one leg with arms spread wide, so I decided to do the same, since I had footing sufficiently and so on. 
I also enjoyed this sign instructing us not to “touch life in the pond”. For some reason, it made me think of some sort of primordial ooze that I shouldn’t touch.
Our next stop was a temple called Kiyomizudera. It was huge, and beautiful and crowded with Japanese tourists, like every other site in Kyoto this weekend!
If you drink from this waterfall, your ailments will be cured. Karen and I did not have any ailments so we passed on this water of dubious quality.
This little guy is a both a Shinto god and a Buddhist god-like figure.
Very crowded Kiyomizudera
We stopped for an early dinner at a little restaurant which had an English menu. Unfortunately they were out of about half the items on their small menu, which left us with the Om-Rice (omelet and rice). Om-Rice is a popular dish available at most restaurants - basically a mound of rice with an omelet cooked over it and some sort of sauce or gravy. They brought out the first plate of Om-Rice, but apparently this restaurant’s specialty was barely cooked omelet and rice. Karen was hungry enough to eat hers, but I was very proud of myself as I stammered out “nama” (the word for raw) and crossed my arms at my wrists to indicate “no”. Who needs to know how to form a sentence in Japanese! My strategy is to learn key words and body language, and it’s working! They took my barely cooked omelet back into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with cooked omelet! Unfortunately that only made the dish barely edible, because the sauce on this particular version of Om-Rice was Thousand Island dressing poured liberally over the rice. To re-cap, dinner was rice, drenched in Thousand Island dressing and topped with raw egg. Only the Japanese could come up with that combination. And I think Karen has been here too long. She started to say she thought her family would enjoy Om-Rice when they come visit. I gave her a look that said “you’ve been here too long”, “this is disgusting”, and “what sort of food did you eat at home if you think they’d enjoy this?” All in one look! I’m getting good at this non-verbal communication!
After dinner, it was too dark to see any more sights, so we headed back to the Kyoto station which was lit up with Christmas decorations. And crowded enough to make us believe we were traveling on Thanksgiving weekend!
On the train ride home, we met this young woman, a university student studying “environmental humor”. I’m still not clear what that might be… I asked her if it was a science and she said no. So I’m clueless. Anyway, she was dressed in a Cos-Play outfit that is apparently the Japanese answer to Goth. It’s kind of cute, but reminds me of Little Boo-Peep.
So that was our weekend in Kyoto. Amazingly, there are still hundreds of temples and shrines which I still haven’t seen there – including some of the major attractions! It’s really an incredible place!
Another sign: "Legend has it that a young priest drew on Benkei's face while he was napping. When Benkei woke up, everyone was laughing at him, and he didn't know why until he looked in this well to see his face. A fight then started and the temple is said to have burned." Makes you think there has to be more to this legend, doesn’t it… 
And while we ate dinner last night at 7 pm, we thought of all of you back home - just waking up to put the turkey in! Happy Thanksgiving!!
Karen, going back for seconds! (I was right behind her filling my plate up again!)
The only disappointment - no pie for dessert. But I was too full to do much complaining.
And to further put us in the holiday spirit, we appreciated the holiday decorations put up in downtown Himeji. The first photo is of Muyidori, the covered shopping arcade. And the blue Christmas tree is on the front of Himeji station. You can't see from this distance, but instead of ornaments, it has four or five large white egrets (the city bird).
We started at 
Julian threw in a 5 yen coin (considered the best coin to throw in before praying because the word for 5 yen, “go-en” is also a word meaning “close relationship”) and made a wish. We don’t know what he wished for though… 
There were lots of these placards at the shrine, as there are at any shrine, but these placards mostly contained wishes for ending or beginning relationships. Our guide translated a couple of them for us and told us it was OK to read the ones on top, but it’s rude to dig through the pile of placards.
We wandered right into Maruyama Park which was the first real “park” in Kyoto (historically, Japan has had “gardens” and parks were a concept introduced by Westerners). It looked quite a bit like a garden to me though, except for the foreigner playing guitar and singing on the park bench.
The abacus. How it works is still a mystery to me. The teacher asked them to demonstrate 1 +2. Hello, we have ten fingers, just count it out!!
The clever boy on the left took photos of his grandmother's living room which is very traditional. In the photos were a household Buddhist altar, a set of dolls which are a traditional wedding present (the dolls are old people, so it's a wish to grow old together), a folding screen, and tatami mats.
For some reason, every class has shown me these little bean bags that kids juggle. And there is always one kid in the class who is a really good juggler.
Other students are spending Trial Week doing community service projects at nursing homes or at this orphanage. (These students are in their gym uniforms)
(It started raining at this point, so that was the end of the today's photography. These last photos are ones I've taken earlier.)
