Golden Kyoto

Ahh how I love that city!
Golden Week - the Japanese accumulation of important national holidays that usually bestows them with about one completely free week - is over and so is my trip to Kyoto with flatmate and friend and fellow Japan exchange student Meiju (http://lone-finn-lost.blogspot.com/).

It was, simply, great.
The weather that week was perfect, I think we only had one day in between when it rained at all, and it was just so nice to finally return to Kyoto. I had been there before in 2009 with 5 friends and I think all of us fell in love with it at that time. Like many other Japanese cities,  this is a huge city too, but not nearly as huge or as busy as Tokyo. The people seem a little bit friendlier here, if maybe only because they have a little more time. We got a nice example of it when we stood in front of a small shop checking our map for a convenient store and the shop owner came out to asked what we were searching for and if we needed help. That reminded me a lot of the grandpas who used to come to help us if we stood with question-marked faces in front of a metro table two years ago. So friendly!

Generally, because of Golden Week the city was packed and mostly so with Japanese. We saw only very few westerners about because well, Golden Week is famous for bringing all of Japan out to Kyoto and places like it, so usually tourists from other countries are advised to travel at other times. But since both Meiju and I are on exchange right now, this was also for us the only holiday, so of course we went, joining the myriads of Japanese on our trip through way too many temples.

I wouldn't have believed it before, but one can get tired of watching temples and shrines. Though it's maybe not being tired of them, but rather the having to move around through them. The thing I always love most about temples are in any case their gardens. The same goes for shrines. As a small explanation: the difference between the two is the religion they serve. Temples are for Buddhism, shrines for Shintoism, which is a religion much to do with nature that in Japan predated the Buddhism coming from China.

And the gardens are brilliant. I can't even say which was the most impressive. They are all beautiful but maybe the strangest is the beauty of the dry sand-and-stone gardens that are connected to Zen-Buddhism. In the temple complex of Daitoku-ji in the north of Kyoto, in the garden of the Daisen-in temple for example is a garden which, with stones, plants and the typical, raked white gravel, expresses the different stages of a human life. It was very impressive and very touching, somehow. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos, but a Google image search for 'Daisen-in' gives quite usable results.

Also amazing was the huge garden of the equally huge Heian shrine. Different kinds of complexes for different flowers or sceneries, all in that strange, hard to explain, uniquely Japanese beauty. In some gardens and parks we even saw herons, and of course the famous koi (-fish) in almost every single pond, also joined sometimes by turtles.

When it comes to animals the most fun was of course the city of Nara, about 45 minutes from Kyoto by train. There, a huge park houses supposedly 1000 deer, beheld as messengers of the gods. In the mornings that message mostly seemed to be 'cookie?', in the afternoons it went rather like 'Urgh! no more cookie...'
You see, for 150Yen one can buy a small package of deer cookies. At around half to ten, when there weren't yet many people in the park and the deer had been without cookies for the night, they would come eagerly, waiting for their treat. But around noon, with the park absolutely packed with people (Golden Week, remember?) they had mostly had their fill and weren't really all that interested in the food anymore. It was hilarious. One of my best pictures from this trip is of a young male lying with his snout flat to the ground, eyes closed, his whole posture rather exhausted and just so full and directly in front of his nose, utterly untouched, one single round cookie.

Which reminds me, pictures will again be uploaded in a seperate post as 'picture book', since right now I'm once again running out of time. But to sum this trip up:


29.04. - 01.05. - Kyoto:
      Gion (the Maiko and Geisha - or rather, Geiko - quarter)
      Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka cobblestone streets and the Philosopher's Walk, a path along a small
      channel called so for the fact that some famous philospher well, walked along it a lot
      Sannenzaka museum and its urushi exhibition
      Kyomizu and Chion temples - Kyomizu build into the side of the mountain on wooden stilts
                          without the usage of nails, Chion with two very nice gardens

02.05. - 03.05. - Nara
     Nara's deer park with the various shrines and temples in it, of which I liked most one smaller build
     on the slope of a small mountain which gave a fantastic view and the Kasuga Grand shrine with it's
     scores of stone lanterns

04.05. - 08.05. - Kyoto again
     but this time we stayed further north
     Kyoto Botanical Gardens - a breathtaking amount of flowers and plants in beautiful gardens
     and the conservatory was unbelievable
     Daitoku-ji temple complex, Kinkaku-ji (the Golden Pavillion) and Ryoan-ji with it's world famous
     Zen garden

All along out trip we stayed in Ryokan, Japanese style guesthouses which are characterized by tatami rice mats, futons (sturdy matresses on the tatami floor were you sleep under a blanket roughly 50cm thick) and the thinnest walls possible (meaning if I understood Japanese better I could have, at half to 7 in the morning, listened in on the four older women who stayed in the room beside ours when we spend out last morning in Kyoto). Ryokan also seem to be characterized by the toilets with heated seats, which seems to me a very strange connection with the otherwise so traditional style, but my behind definitely likes them.

This is of course a very short summary of a trip like that, but in the end I think the pictures can probably tell more. It was great, as I can only repeat again and again. It was great being back in Kyoto, being back even to that one small restaurant in which we ate together when visited first in 2009. It was great seeing the Japanese sense of beauty expressed the best in those gardens. It was great being together with Meiju whom I now probably won't see for another 9 months.

Thank you Meiju, thank you Nara, thank you Kyoto, thank you Japan. I bow to you.