trains and gardens
starting this one with another housekeeping note:
i completely revamped the /gallery/ page again. turns out opening a page that immediately asks your web browser to load over 1,000 high-res images can slow it down a bit. so i split the gallery into sections to maybe lighten the load a bit. in doing so, i realized i never added a section to it for march 31st.
the last 3 days in kyoto have been a whirlwind. i am writing this as well as the posts for april 5th and 6th, on april 7th, because i have been quite occupied for the last three days.
for these three days, we began each day by catching an early train meeting up with our friend, tsukasa-sama, in kyoto, and then saw many sights all over kyoto with his expert guidance. having the guidance of someone who lives in kyoto is a massive advantage. so much of what we saw in kyoto is the type of thing we never would have found on our own. incredible restaurants and events that had to be booked weeks in advance, and perfectly planned itineraries that flowed from one sight to the next with very little wasted time. he is a great tour guide.
it was physically exhausting for me, but extremely worth it. i missed a couple parts of it because my feet suck and i am out of shape, but i loved every bit of it.
many parts of this kyoto trip are things that would have been the only thing i did for the day if i had come here alone. in part because that’s how i have been handling the trip, but also because i just wouldn’t have been able to coordinate doing all the things in sections the way tsukasa-sama could.
kyoto station
kyoto station was our starting point in kyoto. we came here from osaka at the beginning of all 3 days.
the station itself is beautiful, and massive. not as large as shinjuku station, which i mentioned in a previous blog post, but it is much prettier to look at compared to shinjuku station’s extremely utilitarian vibe. and it also contains a 13 floor partially underground mall. many parts of this station don’t look anything like every other train station i have been to. and that proved to be a theme with kyoto as a whole. it has a very strong identity unlike any other area i have seen in japan.
to give context to how big this station is, this is a picture of an ad for every restaurant connected to the station.
every one of those white squares is a different restaurant. its absolutely enormous.
kyoto train museum
the first stop for the day was the kyoto train museum. as you might expect, japan is quite fond of trains. and of course they would be proud to show them off, considering they hold the first, second, and third place records for the railway land-speed record.
as usual on this trip, we arrived early and had time to spare, so we walked around the adjacent park for about a half hour.
as i have said a few times on this blog, cherry blossom season has begun. this has made so much of the country exceptionally beautiful. i can’t capture it in a photo, but the cherry blossom petals slowly falling to the ground is such a beautiful thing. i am so so so so glad i chose this time of year to do this trip.
after walking through this park for a bit, and stopping for coffee for the coffee drinkers in the group (everyone but me), we headed to the train museum.
it was a very interesting museum, and was about 3 times bigger than i thought it was going to be.
we were about to leave the museum, but we spotted a sign indicating we could go to the roof of the building and get a view of kyoto, so we checked that out first.
this gave us a faraway look at the next stop on the trip, toji temple.
lunch
for lunch, we headed back to kyoto station and walked around looking at restaurants. we decided a meal i had never heard of before: chazuke.
coming from the words “ocha” (tea) and “tsuke” (submerge), this is a soup dish. you get a bowl of rice with a topping, in my case raw tuna, and a pot of tea. instead of soup broth, you pour the tea into the bowl and that serves as the broth.
it sounds weird, but it was genuinely incredible. i have never seen this offered at any japanese restaurant in america, and i wish it was. i was told by a couple different people that this meal is common for japanese people to eat when they are sick, or after a night of heavy drinking.
after lunch, we took a train from kyoto station to our next destination, and i got this picture along the way.
to-ji and kanchi-in
our next stop was just a hop, skip, and train ride away - to-ji.
i wont info dump too hard here, as you can get the history lesson on the above linked wikipedia page if you want it. to-ji is a buddhist temple founded in the year 796, when kyoto (known at the time as heian-kyo) was the capital of japan. as is the case with many historical sites in japan, the original was destroyed, but this time not by americans in 1945. it was burned down in 1486, and then also got destroyed again by an earthquake 100 YEARS LATER in 1586. BUT THE STRUCTURE AS IT STANDS IS STILL NEARLY 500 YEARS OLD. PERHAPS THE MOST recognizable part of to-ji is the 5 story pagoda, which is the tallest wooden structure / the tallest pagoda in japan.
as with seemingly all buddhist temples, there are large sections where photography is not allowed. so this is not everything i saw here. we also visited an adjoining temple called kanchi-in, which was absolutely gorgeous. you have to remove your shoes to enter, and it is a very peaceful area that houses two paintings by miyamoto musashi, a very famous japanese swordsman, kensei, and philosopher. he wrote a very famous book called the book of five rings, and is said to be the first person in japanese history to fight with two swords.
musashi’s paintings are on display in a room with very little pomp or circumstance. there is no big sign that says “hey, two very very famous paintings are in this room”. kanchi-in does not even advertise that they have these on display. the only reason we even knew about it is because of the wonderful guided tour we are getting from tsukasa-sama. we looked at these paintings for a minute before tsukasa-sama let us know they were musashi’s work.
at this point, my feet were in pretty serious pain. the section with no shoes made me realize how much the shoes i have actually are helping, because i basically lost all ability to think or process anything by the end of it. i stepped away from the group and found a place to sit down. i thought i could just take a break and recover, but that turned out to not be the case. i ended up going home for the day after this, while they continued on to perhaps the biggest tourist attraction in all of japan, fushimi inari shrine. this is something i am certain anyone reading this has seen photos of, it is the place with the 10,000 bright ted torii gates (⛩️).
even if i hadn’t gone home for the day, i would not have been able to do this place on my best day. it is 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) of stairs to get up to it. absolutely not my thing regardless of where i was at mentally and physically at this point in the day.
i believe they also visited nijo castle, which i would have liked to have visited.
