I usually hate crowds, but they actually made this a fun day out, especially because Japanese schoolkids make such a nice backdrop to a photo. If this were back home, I could only imagine the sight of hordes of high schoolers being dragged through a temple. Smiles and giggles? Not so much.

Oh, the reverse suspense is killing me. So, this is the view you're rewarded with if you make it up here, which is really quite nice. Those wooden plaques have nothing to do with this, but I think they're cute. They're special prayers, mostly to do with doing well on exams or finding a boyfriend, with the occasional Hello Kitty added to help it stand out from the crowd. Speaking of crowds...

Here's the real attraction of the temple. It's built in a bucolic setting on a mountain side, with the temple hanging over the edge supported by a bunch of beams. Supposedly a popular Japanese saying when talking about someone's courage is "have you the courage to jump from the veranda of Kiyomizu?" I would bet that's not a very popular saying unless it's much easier on the tongue in Japanese.

The temple itself is quite quiet and elegant, and at first glance surprisingly peaceful given the crowds on the approach... (As you can tell, I'm trying to build up a gotcha moment where I'm leading toward shocking you with the crowds, but I just realized it won't work since the blog works in reverse, so you'll actually see the crowds before these peaceful scenes. Curses! Foiled again)

We ended the day by tackling our biggest crowd challenge to date, as you can see from the lovely road leading up to the entrance of Kiyomizu-dera. Amazingly, this narrow street choked with temple visitors and lined with shops selling the previously dissed sweets, souvenirs and temple offerings, is also a real road with traffic on it, so the whole thing will just explode one day. But it's quite a party on the way up, as well as at the temple, as every visitor seems to be a teenager.