Traditional Japanese immersion in Kyoto.
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008Kyoto is the old capital of the Japanese empire and is still considered the cultural center of the Japanese culture. Is very close to Osaka, merely 30 minutes in a regular train. Other cities in the Kensai province are Nara and Kobe. In this part of the country there are thousands of temples and shrines, 300 hundred of them only in Kyoto.
We stayed in Kyoto two days to have a glimpse of the Japanese traditional culture. In our first day we visited the Higashi and Nishi Honganji Temple and we had lunch in Shosei-en which is a traditional Japanese garden.
Playing in Shosei-en
We were couchsurfing in Kyoto with Makoto, a very kind Japanese guy that offered us to stay in his guest house. In case you ever read this, thank you for your hospitality Makato!
The next day we visited the famous Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社 Fushimi-Inari-taisha) where the famous tunnel made of thousands of individual orange Torii is. This is considered one of the most beautiful places in Japan and it has appeared in lots of movies. Each one of the Torii represent a wish and you can walk all the way up to another shrine in the top. In the Shinto shrine at the top we ask for a blessing for our future.
After that we went to the Kiyomizu-dera (清水寺) temple, and later on we walk around Kyoto visiting other buddist temples and Shinto shrines. In the evening we went to Gion.
Gion (祇園) is the traditional Geisha district. If you haven’t yet, you should read Memories of a Geisha which I seriously recommend to have a picture of what a geisha duties are and what Gion is. There are only around 300 Geishas left in Japan, out of them 80 are in Kyoto. We started walking through Gion and we realized that nowadays it is a strange place where old teahouses are in the same street of (strip)clubs and martini bars just besides traditional restaurants.
We didn’t want to leave Kyoto without seeing a Geisha so we stayed in front of a big teahouse where expensive European cars were waiting in front of the entrance. After a few minutes, the Geishas started to appear in the streets. We were lucky because we saw 5 of them. They don’t mind the people making pictures but they don’t pose, so at the end we were like paparazzi, pursuing them in the rain of Gion’s streets.
Geisha on Gion district
After seeing the Geishas we felt that we had done everything we wanted to do in Kyoto and the next day we got the Shinkansen to Tokyo.
