03/26 Kyoto

The first thing I noticed about Kyoto is the train station is really
neat. There is an observation deck and sky walk at the top but we
didn't explore yet. The other general thing about Kyoto is there are a
million shrines and temples and seeing the sites require a log of
walking.

After dropping off our bags we went to grab some food. I grabbed some
rice and curry which was really good.

It took about an hour to reach our first destination, kiyomizudera, a
large temple in the mountains famous for its pure spring water, said
to have healing powers, and love stones. If you could walk from one
stone to the other without looking you would find love sooner then
later. In the markets they had a special creampuff called kiyomizuzaka
yatuhashi syu with sakura cream. We also had some tamba beef buns.

We next tried to get to the silver pavillion, a shrine at the north
end of the city and ran into some other sites along the way.

The first was korai-ji temple and higashi otani mausoleum. After a
little more walking we reached maruyama park, which was nice with
sakuras and water. At the park there was a street performer so was
doing juggling and magic who was pretty good and got a large crowd to
watch.

After some more walking we passed konkai-komyoji temple and a mountain
with the character "big" printed on it before arriving at the silver
pavillion. Unfortunately, the temple was closed as it had taken around
5-6 hours to walk there. Near the temple was a small shrine with many
lit up lanterns whiched looked very nice at night.

For our walk back we wanted to take a look a the district Gion, the
geisha district. It rained for most of our walk back which wasn't
nice. After about an hour to two we reach Gion but all the geishas
were already inside the restaurants working.

We found a ramen and gioza shop for dinner before heading back. It was
a long day of walking, around 18 km, but probably the best way to see
kyoto as shrines are everywhere.