Toji Temple

Toji Temple Buddhas
Toji Temple
Toji Pagoda
The first site that we went to was Toji Temple. Once we got a little close to it, we couldn’t miss the 5 story pagoda. It is said that it is the tallest such pagoda in Japan. We followed it to get where we wanted to be. There was a large temple ground with a lot of different shrines and temples.

Besides the large pagoda, looking back at it, there is not too much to say. However, I felt very excited being there because it was the first site that we were at in Kyoto. It wasn’t a very far walk from the train station (about 15 or 20 minutes, which was nice. Because we knew before hand that we wouldn’t be able to check in before 3 o’clock, we packed light enough to put all of whatever we took into backpacks. This was easy since we were only going to be gone for three days. We knew that we would have to walk a lot on the first day to try to get in all of the different things that we wanted to see in Kyoto.

Seeing everything we wanted to would be a bit easier since we also learned that the train going back to Tokyo leaves so frequently, and we could basically leave on Wednesday whenever we want to. That said, looking at our maps, it looked like there were four main tourist sections of Kyoto that seemed like they were a bit apart from each other: southeast, northeast, center, and northwest. As always, I was concerned for the time we had, and worried that we might not be able to get everything in that we wanted to. We spent a while at Toji Temple, and ate some lunch on the grounds before setting off for our next destination.