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.

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.

We spent the rest of the day in Western Kyoto, which is much less popular with tourists, with a couple of exceptions. The temple of Daitoku-ji was quite empty, and with good reason. It's a very large complex, but it's weirdly arranged, with two dozen self-contained small temples inside a huge compound. And most of these are closed to visitors, so most of the time you're just walking outside walls. But if you're ever in the neighborhood, keep an eye out for the monk in the doorway at left. He runs the temple he's standing in, and he's very eager to talk and quite entertaining.

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?

I'm sure you remember the earlier story of the monk who starved himself to death and used to pray 60,000 times a day. Well, do ya? The Chion-in temple was built on the site where he died, and is now the headquarters of the Buddhist sect descended from his original followers. The entrance to the temple at left is quite majestic, and opens into a huge open space with temples and monks' quarters sprinkled around. In most of the buildings, the floors are constructed as "nightingale floors", which make a distinctive noise every time they're stepped on in order to alert the monks to intruders. I can see the benefit of this at night, but during the day, wouldn't it be like being surrounded by kids with those horrible sound and light shows built into their shoes?

While locals and architecture experts can easily tell the difference between Shinto and Buddhist temples, novices like me need telltale signs; here are two dead giveaways. First, at left is a torii, which all Shinto temples have. It's a ceremonial gateway marking the border of the temple grounds. This one is really unusual in that traffic is streaming through it. Second, at right, shinto temples have huge displays of sake (rice wine) barrels. They're actually just warehousing the sake to drink later, but they form a distinctive Shinto decorative touch. I think it also makes Shinto the only religion that flaunts the drinking habits of its priests.

Just when you thought all the temples were starting to look the same, along comes Heian Jingu. It's brand new in Kyoto terms, having been built in 1895 to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of the city's founding. It's quite garish and hard to love, especially compared to the other temples we've been seeing. While it's a Shinto temple rather than Buddhist, that doesn't account for the difference, because as you'll see most Shinto temples are much more subdued. Mostly it's because it was really built as a piece of civic architecture rather than a religious building. Also, while it's still in Eastern Kyoto, it's built much closer to the city center than the other temples, and busy streets run through it as well.

Well, unless we've become real divas and decided to change our clothes several times a day, it looks like I'm starting day three. A bit odd, since day two ends at lunch. Here's a couple of photos of Nanzen-ji, a very big complex of temples that serves as the headquarters for a major Zen Buddhist sect. Like many buildings in Kyoto, it was destroyed in a civil war at the start of the 17th century then rebuilt shortly thereafter.

You would think the dancing statue would take top billing at the temple, but you'd be wrong. The real reason it attracts tourists is the temple is on the outskirts of the city up a hill a bit, so you get views of the unimpressive Kyoto skyline from the temple. Personally, I'd take the dancing statue, but unfortunately it didn't dance while we were there. Above is a sort of zen cemetery, stripped down memorial stones and wooden poles. I should mention at this point that I like to refer to photos as above, at right etc. but it seems like after I'm done composing an entry, the photos just move about at will and rarely correspond to my written description. I'll continue to do this, but just keep in mind that it will usually point you in the wrong direction. In this particular case, I'm hoping the reader can distinguish which of the pictures is the cemetery and which is the Kyoto skyline.

Eikan-do was founded in 856 but most of the buildings are from the 16th century. It honors another populist monk, who was so fond of Buddha that he used to lead his followers dancing around the temple grounds. There's a famous statue at the center of the temple showing Buddha looking back over his shoulder, which is unique since Buddha statues all over Asia follow pretty strict rules about what positions you can show him in. The reason for the backward look is one day while the monk and his followers were dancing around, the statue came to life and started leading the dancers. The monk was understandably surprised and momentarily forgot his dance steps, and the dancing statue turned around to yell at the monk to stop screwing up the macarena and pick up the pace.

Ah, the peaceful serenity of a quiet Buddhist temple, in this case Eikan-do. There are 1,200 Buddhist temples in Kyoto, and 30 Shinto shrines. Shinto, in case you don't know, is the Japanese national religion, and generally coexists with Buddhism since both religions are very laid back. Shinto has some nature worship elements, and theoretically believes that the emperor is a god, although it's safe to say nobody believes anything like that now. But people will make offerings for good luck at both types of temples, and observe certain rituals at one or the other depending on how it looks. Shinto weddings, for example, are pretty cool looking, I've got some photos of one in Tokyo from a later trip I think.