Having finished up our sightseeing tour of Eastern Kyoto, we spent the rest of the day in the semi-historic part of town sandwiched between the ancient temples and the ugly modern city. The most famous part of this sandwich is Gion, the heart of the geisha culture, which is probably pretty well known to everyone due to the book/movie Memoirs of a Geisha. Of course I don't understand for a moment the appeal of a geisha, who trains for decades in all sorts of arcane arts and gets paid exorbitant fees to entertain businessmen covered in the most frightening makeup imaginable (the geishas, not the businessmen). But it's certainly unique to Japan, and the many centuries of tradition behind the geisha bring Gion, the geisha district to life. Of course you can't see them entertain, since that is strictly for local, private sessions, but in the evening you can see them shuffling along in their kimonos with their apprentice geishas trailing behind. The area itself suffers from some intrusions from the modern city, but overall gives a good idea of what the city would have looked like for the thousand years before WWII. An added bonus to this area is Shimonzen-dori, a very pretty street lined with very high end antique dealers. And this is where we went looking for some souvenir, and ended up buying a gorgeous 17th century gold screen, which as many of you know has now traveled almost as much as we have. After 400 years in one place, we had it shipped to Thailand, but couldn't get it through customs so it bounced to my parents house in Connecticut, then round tripped back to Thailand, and then made its way to Sydney when we moved.