Kyoto…what an experience that was. It was our overnight weekend trip in Japan. We started our trip by visiting the Fushimi Inari Shrine which is built at the bottom of a mountain and has trails leading to the top with shrines along the way. What is so unique about this shrine is the thousands of Torii gates built throughout the shrine. They are donated by different companies to hope for wealth. Each size represents the amount of money given to the shrine to build the gate.
Next, we made our way to the Toji temple which has a five story Pagoda and beautiful gardens.
After seeing the shrine and temple, we checked into our Ryokan (Japanese hotel) in the Gion district, which is where all the Geisha’s seem to be. In this hotel we got our own maid who showed us our room, laid out the bed dressing (on the floor) where the table is located and took our order for breakfast (basically what kind of rice we wanted).
That night we enjoyed a dinner show where two Maiko entertained us with dancing, socializing and competing in drinking games.
After a long night of sleeping on the floor, we ate an interesting breakfast, shown below. And then we moved into a more western style hotel.
Our next stop was a temple in the town of Nara (outside Kyoto) where we saw the Todaiji Temple. At this temple there were a ton of wild deer hanging around the park. It was the popular to buy crackers and feed them, so Matt did.
Then we went to the Kasuga Shrine were there were thousands of lantern (and more deer).
The next day we went to the Honganji Temples and looked around before making our way to the Golden Pavillion, which is the most well known site to see in Kyoto.
Shortly after our trip to the Golden Pavilion, we went out to explore the town by bicycles and Deanna crashed hers by getting back on the sidewalk and hitting the curb wrong. We went back to our base early and ended up finding out that her wrist was broken. Someday we will have to go back and see what we were unable to.
Check out more blogs about our travels here.
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Traveling Houses
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