Personal Kyoto Guide

This morning, our friend Maya arrived at our Ryokan to give us a tour of Kyoto.  Maya is a professor at the Ritumekan Univ and a frequent visitor to the University of Virginia where she does research in the library.  Last year, she had promised to give us a personal tour of places that not all the tourists know about..

The first exciting part was a ride in a taxi.  It reminded me of Mr. Toad's wild ride from one of my childhood movies.  I was terrified, but shouldn't have been because in most cases we had at least an inch of clearance between us an the bus or the next car or a moped--all done at a pretty high speed.  Our driver delivered us to the Temple of 100 Buddhas.  This was quite the sight and very historical.  Each Buddha was different in some way.  No photos allowed inside.

Then we walked (or really climbed) to Kiyomizu Temple which is high above the city.  The view was magnificent, and the walk uphill through the shops was fun.  Nancy kept getting left behind while she took pictures.  This is a tourist mecca, but it was not too crowded.  We ran into some SAS kids while there.

Then we walked down some back streets where we saw girls decked out in Kimonos. They rent these to walk around in for fun and get attention.  I'll have photos later. We saw shops where they are getting ready for "girl day" on March 3.  Girl day lasts all your life for a female.  The shops had beautiful jewelry, pottery and kitsch.  Then we stopped at a Starbucks to discuss what we had seen and get a good cup of coffee.

Our next shop was the Niski Food Market.  This is about a 5 block street with food shops. We saw raw fish, cooked fish, baked goods, pickled everything, sweets and all foods Japan.  Then we headed for a special restaurant for lunch, but it had a long wait, so we got into another (not so wild) cab and headed to the University where Maya teaches for a noodle lunch.  I got to hone my slurping skills which is a polite thing to do while eating noodles.  Maya had to head to a meeting after lunch, so we sadly parted ways and headed to the Kinkakuji  Temple.  It is also called the Golden Pavillion and is completely gold. The grounds were beautiful, and the place was crawling with tourists. Then we walked about a mile to Zen Garden, but is was closed for some construction.

We were adventurous and figured out how to take a bus back while getting a taste of how the locals travel. You can tell that the seats are not made for big guys like me.  At one stop, I saw a bunch of SAS kids waiting and looked out and they yelled "Warner" and crowded onto the bus.  They had come from Tokyo earlier in the day and were going on to Kobe to stay on the ship tonight.  Nancy and I headed back to the market and shopped and took pictures.  We were be-friended by a Japanese man who' son is studying in some indeterminate place in the U.S.  He described foods for us as we went along.

After running into a SAS faculty member, we headed back to our Ryokan (walking). We remembered that Maya had said that the basement of dept. stores had big food courts, so we stopped in and were awed by a football field size area of foods from local cooked goods to luxury candies from Europe.  We bought food for dinner here and took it with us. There is no place to sit and eat in these areas, and Japanese do not eat while walking on the streets.  I wanted to duck into an alley and have an illicit bite of the grilled food I bought. Nancy asked what I had bought and I had to admit that I had no idea.  It later turned out to be chicken.

After eating in our room and resting, we headed out to the local restaurant for Sake.  Sake can be served warm or cold, so we went with the warm.  The chef kept giving us side dishes to try, and I got most of it since Nancy declined octopus.  It is cold outside, but by this time we were warm and headed back and set up our futon in our room.  I'm taking a few minutes to write this blog while Nancy has probably stolen the book that I was reading.

Tomorrow we head for Kobe.  Thank goodness for small Ryokans with a computer in the lobby.