After lunch, we walked deep into the forest to get to our next temple, Kasuga Taisha, which I think is the coolest of the bunch although quite out of the way. There are lots of windy paths through the forest that eventually will take you here, but once you get anywhere near the place, the path is lined with thousands of stone lanterns, which is a really striking sight. The temple itself has lots more lanterns inside, as you'll see, and twice a year, it has a lantern festival where all the walkway and temple lanterns are lit, which must take forever. It's a Shinto temple, built by the powerful Fujiwara family as their family temple when Nara was capital.

So I lied about the cherry blossoms picture, I didn't really lose patience, I just decided to use this photo instead for my dramatic ending to Kyoto. Thanks for your patience in staying with us through a pretty thorough trip down memory lane. It really is an amazing city, and even though you're suffering from Kyoto overload, remember there's over 1,000 more temples to see, and some major sights that were closed while we were there. So we've got to go back at some point, maybe we'll see you there.

Somchai is certainly getting his money's worth out of this temple, moving from risking his life drinking unknown fluids, to tempting death by pecking. As you can see by the top left picture, it looks a bit touch and go there for a while, but, as in the drinking incident, he survives.

This temple is the second largest wooden structure in Japan. By a strange coincidence, we're now leaving Kyoto by train to nearby Nara, to see the country's largest.

Woke up very hungry after our micro-banquet the night before, and probably finished off a big bowl of salad for breakfast to fortify myself for our last Kyoto temple, Higashi-Hongan-ji. We stay in Kyoto a few more days but do day trips outside of Kyoto, so we stopped by this temple on the way to the train station. Somewhat bravely I must say, Somchai decides to take a drink from the liquid pouring out of the old dragon's mouth. I'm not sure what the sign next to him is saying. It looks like it's saying this is not a faucet, but that's obvious, so my best guess is it's saying DO NOT DRINK.

This is sort of a catch-all post before we move on to our last Kyoto post! At left is a very cool but very unphotogenic temple, Sanjusangen-do. It's really a big wooden barn with not much garden or anything surrounding it. But inside (the cool part where you can't take pictures) is a big statue surrounded by 1,000 smaller statues standing guard, each unique. You're supposed to come here and look for resemblances between the statues and recently departed loved ones. This could take a very long time with so many statues, but I was pretty sure I wouldn't find a match so it was a pretty quick stop. In the evening, we had an elaborate Japanese meal called kaiseki. Kaiseki is famous throughout Japan, but Kyoto is the most famous place for it. As expected, it consists of large numbers of microscopic dishes, served with a very elaborate ritual. It's a set menu, and it has to change with the seasons, and, uneconomically, all the silverware and plates have to change each time and be exactly matched to each course. So a restaurant has to have huge numbers of specially made china and utensils each season, then throw them out every three months. It was interesting, although after the twelfth hour of ritual eating, interest waned a bit.

Oh, I've been saving the close up photo of the cherry blossom this whole time, figuring I'd use it at the end as a bit of a dramatically Zen finish to my Kyoto writing, but I've lost patience so decided to chuck it in now.

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.

Moving from the beautiful to the profound to the downright ugly, this is central Kyoto. Try to spend as little time as possible here for obvious reasons. It's convenient for a lunch break, as you can pop into the equivalent of a diner for a quick bite of Japanese equivalent of junk food. You sit on a stool at the counter, and of course all the staff give you a big shout out when you walk in (and out) like you're long lost friends. Then you can order things like fried pork on rice, or pretty much anything on rice, or barbecued chicken. It's all kind of familiar, but not. You can even get Japanese pizza in special dive-y restaurants called Okonomiyaki, which is one of my favorites, and I don't think available outside Japan. It's like a cross between a pizza and a pancake, with the ingredients all kind of baked into the dough. No cheese, no tomato sauce but all the usual meat toppings. Often they just bring you the raw ingredients and you make it yourself because you'll be sitting in front of a grill, which is a fun way to experiment, especially if you don't know what you're doing. Of course you can have sushi all over the place, but we tended to have that as a more leisurely dinner.

Besides the ugliness of downtown, I wanted to show you what passes for electioneering in Kyoto. That slowmoving garishly decorated bus with loudspeakers all over it is carrying a political candidate. It manages to snarl traffic, cause earsplitting noise with blaring musak and jingles, and look even uglier than its surroundings. Yet somehow every politician thinks this is the way into the voters' hearts.

Don't worry I can see the light at the end of this very long Kyoto tunnel, just a few more temples and we're outta here. Granted, the shiny gold temple is a lot more immediately appealing then another zen rock garden, but this one at Ryoan-ji is kind of cool because it's got a little game attached to keep you occupied. In this wide field of gravel, there are fifteen rocks scattered around. The key to the "game" is that for Japanese Buddhists, the number fifteen represents completeness. But the trick here is the rocks are so placed that from the viewing platform at the end of the garden, everywhere you walk, you can only see fourteen rocks, and when you move, a new rock appears just as one of the other rocks hides behind another. So you're always seeing an incomplete fourteen. You need a total view of the garden to see the completeness, but in our temporary world, you'll only have an incomplete sense of what the real picture is. Pretty deep, no?

Now that I've dazzled you with the temple's beauty, I'll have to let you down a bit by telling you it's a fake. But the good news is I can tell another story to pad out my text. While the golden pavilion stood unharmed for 650 years, in the 1950's, a student monk burned it to the ground. Nobody's been able to figure out why he did it, although a popular book posits that the monk, who was ugly, was so taken with the beauty of the temple, which he would never share, that he couldn't bear to look at it any more. My money's on insurance fraud, but that's not nearly as poetic. Anyway, it was reconstructed to perfectly match the original, and it remains a beautiful sight in a beautiful setting.

Just when you're thinking the temples are all starting to look the same, along comes Kinkaku-ji to shake things up. This was built again as a retirement home for a shogun in 1393. This time, the shogun couldn't devote himself full time to the usual moongazing and teamaking because his ten year old son had succeeded him, and presumably the ten year old needed a bit of help now and then. Especially because during that time there was a civil war, and famine and plague in Kyoto. An estimated 1,000 people a day died in the city due to these problems, so it was quite a handful to bequeath to the ten year old.

Just some nicer photos of the palace interior to show the whole thing doesn't look like a benihana. The women at right are (oviously) dressed in kimonos. That's actually fairly common in Japan. Of course traditional costume is long gone, but almost everyone would have a kimono for formal events and certain holidays. Of course, nothing in Japan is simple, so you can devote your life to the intricacies of kimonos, and the best ones, as worn by geishas for example can cost a fortune.

Thought I'd go with a Bridges of Imperial Palace theme while I digress into attacking the Imperial family. In my largely uninformed opinion, this has to be the wimpiest royal family anywhere in the world. Their giant claim to fame is they are the world's oldest royal family, by a long shot, since they've been ruling Japan pretty much since there's been a Japan, while other ruling families take over and get overthrown in the general tussle of ruling. But the way they've survived is to be almost invisible. Almost invariably for the first thousand years, the shoguns who nominally served them actually ran the country and ignored and humiliated them. And the emperors' response was to sit in their gardens, making tea and writing haikus. Keep in mind that the Japanese believed their emperors were gods at the time, which should have given them some leverage. They have a brief flash of willpower in the late 1800's when the shogun is finally overthrown and the emperor moves to Tokyo, but he's promptly coopted by the military and ignored again, albeit in a nicer palace. Then after the second world war, the military is wiped away, so it's hard to see who's going to boss the emperors around now, but believe it or not, the bureaucracy takes over. The Imperial Household Agency, basically the emperors' servants, totally dictates what the emperor does and whether he's allowed out of his palace, they even gave the current princess a nervous breakdown because they kept pushing her to have a boy. Most husbands wouldn't tolerate the servants giving their wives a breakdown, but not in this family. Anyway, I do think the bridges are pretty.

Started the next day at the grand in name only Imperial Palace. Perhaps tricked by the name, this is the only place in Kyoto where we actually saw foreign tour groups. It's perfectly pleasant, but pretty undistinguished, substantially less grand than Marie Antoinette's fake shepherd's cottages in back of Versailles. As you can see at right, it looks a bit like a benihana's. Part of the problem is, like most historical places in Japan, the combination of timber buildings, gas lamps and earthquakes and civil wars causes most buildings to get wiped out all the time. The imperial palace burned down fourteen times in the 12th century, for example. It kept burning and being rebuilt, most recently in 1788, then again fifty years later, so this "palace" was only built in 1855. I think everyone was just so tired of the burn and rebuild cycle, and expected that whatever they built would just burn again anyway, that they sort of gave up, and unfortunately, that's the version that survived. Then it was only lived in for a few decades before the emperor moved to Tokyo. It's still used for coronations and some other ceremonies, though.

In the evening, we moved to the neighboring entertainment district of Pontocho, alongside the river. It's really just one long street running parallel to the river, but houses most of the popular restaurants, bars, karaoke joints etc. It's also got some geisha action going, but in general the area is not as upscale as Gion. It's a very lively place to walk around at night, as Japanese, usually so restrained, drink like maniacs and can be really rowdy at night. It's all a bit of forced fun, since many of them are on business functions with clients, which the Japanese have to do almost every night, trading shots of sake and generally getting plastered. There are lots of nice restaurants in the houses overlooking the river, where we had dinner that night. It's not that easy because they tend to discourage foreign guests because we're so alien, but you'll eventually find one that can cope. The usual way of coping is to just open a menu and point at some characters and see what shows up, although most smaller restaurants have perfected something of an art form in perfectly replicating all the dishes on their menu in plastic and placing the faux food in the shop window. Then it's just a matter of dragging a waitress outside and pointing at various things. You won't necessarily know what the food will taste like, but, in a big improvement over the point at Japanese characters in a menu method, you'll at least know what it will look like.

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.

Some additional photos of Chion-in. Since I don't have much more to say about this temple, I'll go off completely on a tangent to talk about Japanese food. This is a general topic I can use as a filler when there are more pics than words, so for now I'll talk about breakfast, which I think is the weirdest meal of the day in Japan. Asians generally, and Japanese in particular, don't get the idea that different foods are for different parts of the day, so breakfast is pretty much like any other meal of the day, which is tough for a foreigner first thing in the morning. You'll always have a salad, just like a Western side dish with choice of dressing. They'll probably do a separate dish of radishes, which are particularly popular in Japan due to their utter tastlessness. Seaweed figures prominently as well, and of course fish, usually broiled salmon. On the plus side, I think breakfasts are the key reason the average Japanese lives to be 170 years old. On the minus side, 170 years of starting your day with seaweed and radishes?