Page 4 of 5
Kyoto, Japan
A treasure just to look upon it
Kyoto is one hell of a beautiful, one of a kind place, although it takes a little while to realize that. When I first arrived on the Shinkansen from Tokyo, my first impression was the crazy train station and then a pretty uninteresting, kind of boring city. It takes a while before you start finding the shrines and gardens, sometimes in the city but, more often than not, hidden along its edges.
I stayed at an inexpensive inn that called itself a ryokan (most definitely not pictured below), although “inn” is definitely a better description than “ryokan.”. It is in one of those urban, non descript areas of the city but also not all that far south of the main train station. Upon entering you need to remove your shoes, and the small rooms have rice paper screens and roll out mattresses to sleep on the tatami mat floors, but, after that. it’s just a place to stay. I did sleep well there despite the incessant street noise though, a lot of that could be the result of general exhaustion from walking a lot day after day after day as I try to see everything humanly possible in the city.
It would be easy to get sick of seeing temples and gardens, there are a lot of them and although no two are exactly alike, the general feel can be similar enough to grow tiresome. The best way to fight that is to see less temples, which is something that invariably ends up happening. After hitting a lot of the major sites, I found myself skipping some of the minor ones using all of the expected excuses. A real shame. I don’t know how long it would really take to really see everything there- supposedly there are over 1,500 in Kyoto alone- but I imagine that it might take half of a lifetime to really see, and another half of a lifetime to really understand and appreciate them.
I used Kyoto as my home base and really only slept in Tokyo and Kyoto throughout my time in Japan. Kyoto is a great location, and the Shinkansen bullet trains are fast and fun to ride. Green Car Shinkansen seats are very comfortable with lots of legroom (possibly even too much leg room to be honest), adjustable air conditioning, a headphone jack for free Shinkansen music, hot towels and clear announcements in English. I bought a week long JR Rail Pass before I left, and definitely got my money’s worth with all of the trains I ended up riding.
You may have noticed that this whole page of the slideshows I have intentionally been ignoring the pictures and instead writing about other things, like how long it would take to see all of the temples in Kyoto or about how awesome it is riding trains. It is easy to fall in love with Kyoto, I most certainly did, and after a while a lot of the individual details and places blur. You start to forget the boring (even ugly) parts of the city and only remember snapshots like these, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before you’ll go back hoping to see these places you know by heart but also barely recall where (exactly) they were.
