Kyoto - Day Two

Okay, my turn today. As you can imagine, Deana and I are tearing across the city trying our best to see as many things as possible since we only have three days here in Kyoto. The reason Kyoto is famous is, as Deana said, it is the ancient capital of Japan. It is famous for being filled with temples, shrines, scenery, and history. We have taken so many photos and had a ton of fun - it is a shame we can't share them all with you, but hopefully you can get a small taste of what we are experiencing through our photos and stories.

We started out the day by going to the "Golden Pavilion". This is a three story temple that supposedly has the founder of Buddhism's ashes in it. The top two stories are covered in gold leaf. You couldn't go up to the building (I assume for obvious reasons).

From there, we went to Tenryuji Temple. I don't know the significance of this one, but it was pretty. It had a garden behind it that was on some sort of ancient historical registry (surely most all of these places are, right?)


We left the temple and found ourself in a bamboo forest. It was almost entirely bamboo and we found it amazing to see how much sunlight did not make it through to the ground in the thick part of the forest.


After the bamboo, we had the coolest experience of the day. Iwatayama Park, a.k.a. Monkey Park, with free roaming monkeys. Eventhough we just saw wild monkeys two days ago in Hiroshima, this was a very different experience. You could go into a fenced area and buy food to feed the animals. They hung on the outside of the fence and reached through to grab the peanuts, apples, or sweet potatoes. We captured some of it on video for your enjoyment.

Avery feeding the Monkeys (click to play)

Avery feeding the monkeys some more (click to play)

There were also signs that said "do not stare at the monkeys".

Click here to find out why.
It's a shame that the first thing I did was turn off the camera. Had I kept recording, you would have seen me being chased down the trail by a monkey and heard me apologizing to it. Of course in my panic, I was apologizing in English - I forgot these monkeys are Japanese.

We finished up the day going to Fushimi Inari Shrine. This was an area that had thousands of toriis. Toriis are the "gate" that mark the beginning of a sacred area. You typically find them at the front of temples and/or shrines. They went a little overboard here though.



I'll finish the post with some miscellaneous photos that we collected today. I hope this doesn't cause the web page to load to slowly, but since pictures are worth a thousand words, it easier for me to paste a few photos...

I was in "stealth mode" for this one...

Lazy Geisha Girls...



A park employee was feeding this guy peanuts and letting folks squat behind them for photo ops. (free of charge - WHOO HOO!)

We saw so many girls in kimonos today that we finally stopped and asked if we could take a photo of them with Avery.

More monkey photos. Notice how high we are above the city. We started out at that level. It was a 20 minute hike straight up, but it was worth it.