On Kyoto

I have just uploaded a lot of posts about being in Kyoto. You should click on "October" to the right to see all of them.

Daisen-in Temple

Praying Jizu
Temple
Rock Garden
The last temple that we had in our plan to visit before going to the train station was Daisen-in Temple. It was, of course, just one temple that was part of a larger complex of many temples and shrines. Apparently this temple is famous for its rock garden. When we got to the gate, we expected that we would have to pay. However, we did not expect to be told that we would not be able to take photos of the rock garden, or of anything else in the temple. What surprised us even more was that didn’t even allow people to go in and draw or sketch anything within the temple. I thought that was absurd, so we left. Since we were already tired, this only bothered us more, and so we decided that it wouldn’t be worth it to pay to go in and see it. Like I said, we were already tired, so this was the perfect excuse to cut it short and head to the train station.

On our way out of the temple grounds, we saw another small temple, and they allowed us to take photos, so we went in there instead. The experience was very pleasant since, at the end of the day, we were the only ones who were inside the temple, and we felt like we could do whatever we wanted (except that there was a guy who kept following us, probably making sure that we didn’t spit on the Buddha, or whatever). It was a rather small temple, and actually felt like it was a house. Paola and I decided that after we buy our first house, we will raze it to the ground, and rebuild it with the same design and layout as this temple.

After that, we jumped on the first bus that we saw that said it would take us to the train station. From there, we waited about five minutes, just enough time to buy some meals for the ride, and jumped on the train back to Tokyo.

Kinkaku-ji: the Golden Pavilion

Golden Pavilion up close
Golden Pavilion
The only thing that I had my mind set on seeing today was the Golden Pavilion. It was built by Yoshimitsu, the grandfather of Yoshimasa, who built the Silver Pavilion (in fact, Yoshimasa built the Silver Pavilion as a response, and in deference to his grandfather, who had already built the Golden Pavilion). Having walked through Kyoto for a couple of days now, we had already seen lots of postcards and other pictures of the Golden Pavilion, so I didn’t expect to be surprised when we saw it in person.

Walking through the gate, and seeing it through the trees, the Golden Pavilion’s size, and gold-leaf walls shocked me. It really was something. I don’t think that there is another building like it anywhere, all covered in gold like that. Standing in front of a lake, with his gold building reflecting off of the water, I am sure that Yoshimitsu was proud of what he had built.

Ryoanji Temple

Ryoanji Rock Garden
Buddha at Ryoanji
Shrine gate
It was said that Ryoanji Temple has a nice rock garden, and so that is why we wanted to come here. There are 15 large rocks that are masterly placed throughout the rock garden, and so it is beautiful, or so they say. I was rather disappointed by the rock garden. I guess that it was neat in some mystical sense, and I am sure that the Buddhist monks who first arranged the fifteen large rocks such knew something about feng-shui or something like that, but it didn’t appeal much to me. Perhaps I was a bit tired after three days of temples, shrines, and rock gardens. Another things that made this particular site less pleasant was all of the other people around. The whole area where people were allowed to sit and take pictures was crowded, and with everyone snapping away at their cameras (myself included) it didn’t seem that special.

Myoshin-ji

roof tiles
Myoshin-ji Buddha
The first temple that we went to, after getting lost, and going way out of our way, was Myoshin-ji . There was a great garden that also had a dry rock garden. Everything looked very pretty. One great thing was that since we went there relatively early, we were really the only ones in the garden, and having it all to ourselves, we felt that it was almost ours. One surprising thins was that next to a well, where people wash their hands, a frog had taken a rest in the fountain. We felt lucky to have seen it, and it turns out that a day that had started rather unlucky (having gotten lost on the way to our first temple, and not having intended to come here at all), it seemed like it would be a day that would go just fine.

Outside of the garden, in front of the main temples, there was some sort of celebration, or gathering for all of the people involved with the temple, including monks and nuns. It was neat to see all of this going on. I suppose that it takes this many people to keep the large temple grounds functioning.

Kyoto, day 3 – October 24, 2007

George, as a relaxing samurai
The main question of the day for us was, knowing that we had to check out, should we leave our heavy backpacks with the front desk after checking out, in order to walk easier, but necessitating us coming back at the end of the day to pick them up, or should we just carry all our stuff with us, which would be more of a burden, but then we could go straight to the train station? It so ends up that we decided to just take everything with us, since we didn’t feel that we had that much anyway, and since we had walked with all the same stuff our whole first day in Kyoto.

Conveyor belt sushi, again

We wanted a good deal for our money, so we went back to the conveyor belt sushi place. We had several plates of sushi again, and felt like we got a good meal.