Our first stop (this time for certain) was going to be the Inarii shrine that we skipped yesterday due to the inconvenient departure time of bus. This time we knwe when the bus would leave and arrived on time. It only took a few minutes to get to the place from where we walked up the hill past a few souvenir stalls to the shrine. This shrine is famous for it's hundreds of Torii (these red/orange japanese gates) that symbolise the gateway between earth and sky. Also present were many stone statues of angry looking foxes who protected the crops from the mice and rats. There were a couple of kilometres walkways which had a Torii at least every meter, so there must have been thousands rather than hundreds of these Torii here. As we have seen about 300m of it and we imagined the rest would look very similar we decided to head back to the bus stop and pick um some Yakitori and sweets on the way there. I also couldn't resist buying a crazy looking drink.
From the Inarii shrine we went back to Kyoto station with Bus route 5 and then route 101 (this seems to be the tourist bus that passes many attractions and also mentions some very short interesting information about these attractions) to the Nijojo Palace which the imperial residence of the Shogun. The main feature of this place for me was the nightingale floor. These were floor boards that were tinkered with to make squeaky sound when you walked over them. These were used to warn the local samurai of potential intruders. It's said that not even the best Ninja were able to not case a sound. The visit of the palace was followed up by a small walk through the gardens attached to it but unfortunately it now started to rain, so we went back to the bus stop and caught bus number 12 to a world famous stone garden called Ryanji. At this point I would also like to thank Yuni for planning all these bus routes around town, this really saved us a good bit of walking :-)!
This stone garden is apparently very basic (a 10m by 25m rectangle) with only 15 stones spread over the area. The gravel between the bigger stone represents the sea and the stone certain island or lands. The unusual part of this Stone garden was that from any point there were only a maximum of 14 stones visible. It was interesting enough but I wouldn't put it at the top of my list of destinations.
Near the stone garden is one of the more attractive sights of Kyoto and a photogenic icon many times synonyms with Japan. The Kinkaku-ji the golden pavilion. It was used by the third Shogun as a holiday villa. Unfortunately it burned down in 1950 and was rebuilt in 1955. The gardens around it really make it look very tranquil (sorry if I may sound too esoteric now but this is really a cool and beautiful place).
On the way back to Kyoto station sitting and standing in the wet, cramped bus we really felt what we did today. A lot of visits cramped into a short day. A day like this makes you very hungry and what better way to solve this problem by stuffing yourself with Sushi? In 2008 Basti, Jan and I went to a conveyor belt sushi place in Kyoto station and I remember this because it was good and cheap. So, we went and tried to find this place and to be honest with out the help of the station information it would have taken a couple of hours (Kyoto Station is enormous), but we got there pretty quick (before starving anyway).
One plate of sushi was 130 Yen (a bit less than a Euro) and this was for any sushi. Tuna, Salmon, Swordfish... anything.
Our 19 plates were accompanied with some green tea, two Miso soups and cold jug of Kirin. All for 24 €... Next time I'll come by again!
Tomorrow was going to be our last day in Japan and we had to arrange our trip back to Kansai Airport. The cheapest option was going to be a Kansai West JR rail pass but finding the place that could issue this was not that easy. We finally found the right JR office and got our passes. Now it was time to go back to our guest house and enjoy the last evening. We were pretty wrecked but a last bath was a must.
No comments:
Post a Comment