So, last time I wrote about how much time I spent getting to kyoto and going from place to place around it. Despite the difficulties, I still did get to see a lot of the things I wanted to. I had to cut some cool things out of my list to see because they required reservations, but otherwise we got to see a great deal of what we wanted to.
The first day was nearly pointless. We got to our first destination so late that it was closing time for that, so we had to move on. It's unfortunate since we never did go to that place despite it being a big attraction. Another day we tried to go back but it was closed that day and it was just our bad luck. Anyway, we moved on to go near the imperial palace, however we couldn't really go inside it. We just walked around the park that surrounded it. Since we got a bit lost during our trip from the first destination to the imperial palace, we arrived a bit too late and most people were leaving or gone. There wasn't too much to see but at least we did go near the palace.
After that day, we learned how to use the train system better and woke up earlier so that we could see more things in a day. However we never did get to see a few things ( for example,
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3941.html http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3929.html http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3907.html for example ) because of their location. Kyoto was similar to Nara in that it had a lot of old shrines and temples to see, but it was different in that everything was spaced farther apart and trains did not always have stops near the things that we wanted to see. So, of the things we missed, there not only were a few that had reservations we never made, but there were a few that had no train stop near them so it would have taken a long time just to walk from one to the next.
There's two good examples of how I wasn't able to see something due to its location. The first is the day where we wanted to see three locations that were, relative to everything else, nearby each other. On that day the closest train station to the first location resulted in a 40 minute walk from the station to the gold pavilion, and then from there we walked another 20 minutes or so to the rock garden, after which we were going to walk to the last place but didn't have the time and had to turn back. And boy, all that walking was not very fun. Especially not in that high humidity, high temperature weather. I'm reminded of how I thought I wasn't going to spend a lot of money on food every day and that while I didn't, a lot of the money that I did spend each day was on things to drink to stay hydrated.
Anyway, there were about two other places that I wanted to go to, but instead of one long walk from place to place to place, there was simply no train anywhere nearby an isolated place and it would have taken a large part of the day just to travel to the one place and back. One of such places was the silver pavilion. Just look at this map, and see how much of a distance a train station was from the silver pavilion (ginkakuji) , compared to the gold pavilion (kinkakuji) which took over a half hour to walk to! Of course, it wasn't really that travel would take up a whole day, but that most famous locations would close at 5PM so our "days" were shorter than I'd have liked.
We did still get to see some pretty nice places. Heian Shrine was a nice, free trip.. although we must have made a common traveler's mistake since we tried to get there by walking down the main street from the station closest to it, and stopped at the first fancy, old looking building we came across only to find a sign that said this isn't the heian shrine.. we ended up at a martial arts school if I remember correctly. Oops.
We also saw, but did not go near or in Kyoto tower. It wasn't nearly as tall as the sky tree or as cool looking as the tokyo tower so we skipped it to save time for other things. By the way, the gold pavilion and rock garden I mentioned earlier were very beautiful. The gold pavilion was quite the sight to see, from the nice pond constructed around it to the gold-covered building itself. Both it and the rock garden were very peaceful places to be. Another beautiful place I saw was Byodoin temple. Yet another temple, like the golden pavilion, that was surrounded by a sort of pond. Very iconic perhaps, as it's the only building on the coins they have, being on the reverse side of the 10 yen coin.
Oh yes, and among other places there was also the world's longest wooden structure, Sanjusangendo. I have no pictures of the inside since there were 1001 sacred statues that nobody could take photos of, but it was interesting to read about the significance of them, and it was quiet and peaceful despite the many people there. I did manage to get a few pictures of the outside of it however, showing how long the building was. Apparently it used to be used by archers to practice by shooting arrows from one end of the long building to a target on the other end. Judging by how long the building was when I saw it, I thought that was pretty impressive.
I might still be leaving a few locations out, for example a famous temple I went to with my friends during a school trip, rather than on my own. I'll be sure to add more if I did forget anything, but in the meanwhile I'll write about my trips up a mountain, and to an island, next post.
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