Parent's Visit, Part VI: Parent's pics of Kyoto

In this post, my parents and I set out for our Kyoto trip.

These pictures were all taken by my mom. It started early, while we were waiting on the platform for the train, and daddy was feeling goofy. Love your beautiful face, Dad Darling.

The Shinkansen trip was also rather fun. I claimed a window seat, because I get oh so motion sick on the Shinkansen. However, having my mother and father there helped my motion-sickness tremendously (or it at least distracted me from it, which counts just as well).

After getting off at Kyoto, our first stop was at the San-jyu-san Gendo (三十三間堂), which is known for housing 1,000 Buddhas and for being the longest wooden building in Japan.

The grounds around the building were rather pretty, if a bit austere and strict. The flowers were quite gorgeous, and lightened the atmosphere (the day was overcast and kind of dreary, but these pictures and the flowers are cheery).

 

The San-jyu-san Gendo is known as the longest wooden building in Japan, and a few hundred years ago they used to have archery tournaments that set up the archers on one side of the building and the targets on the other side. I'm not quite sure how long the building is, but it's loooong, and no photograph captured it well.

There is a story of a record-winning archer who shot a crazy amount of arrows (either 1000 or 8000, I'm not sure). Basically, he was shooting an arrow every sixty seconds for the entire day. I do not want to know what his shoulder felt like for the next month after that.

The gardens towards the front of the building were quite pretty, and I especially loved the orange-red porch that followed the outer wall of the complex.

This yellow flower bush was quite interesting. We didn't get a great picture of it, but it's little flower heads are comprised of lots of tiny yellow and white flowers bunched together, and since none of the greenery had yet come out, it was quite striking.

This ancient and huge bonsai was also quite impressive.

After the San-jyu-san Gendo, we went back into the city in search for our ryokan ( 旅館, Japanese-style inn). We got a bit lost, but I found that my investment in a smartphone started paying itself off with it's GPS and Googlemaps.

On the way back, we saw a MASSIVE torii.

Huge!

Then we went home and slept. We stayed at an inn called Yuhara, and it was a very pleasant night.

Next day, we went to the Ginkakuji (銀閣寺)！ Yay!
This is the Ginkakuji from my mother's camera lens.

While at the Ginkakuji, I encouraged my parents to get mattcha at the little shop. I am glad I did! It was delicious, and very nice to sit and sip tea at such a beautiful location.

 

Then we moved on. Our goal this day was to start at the Ginkakuji, then walk down the Philosopher's Path, an old, famous road in Kyoto that starts at the Ginkakuji and makes it way slowly back towards our inn, passing by lots of temples and shrines on the way.

Mother really loved all of the house gardens along the walk.

We had lunch at a famous, rather old (I think 300 years old) noodle shop called "Omen." (men means noodle, like in Ramen.)

This is the shop sign where I bought a pretty little haori, or traditional silk coat that's worn with kimono. It was a used kimono shop, so my haori is old, a little stained, and rather small, but I can still wear it around the house, or cut it apart and make a cute jacket out of it.

 

These decorative cabbages are fascinating!

 

Mother liked the map signs they had outside of temple complexes. A lot of them were rather impressive pieces of art, hand-painted onto the wood.

 

 

 

  

More pretty manholes!

And, just so you aren't induced into thinking Kyoto is comprised entirely of temples and shrines, it IS a big metropolitan city.

When Mom first arrived, she saw the city and went "yuck." Then she saw more city, and got rather put out, saying, "Ugh. I don't think I like Kyoto. This is not what I thought it'd be at all. I don't like Kyoto."

... then she got to the temples and shrines, and was like, "Oh, I LOVE Kyoto! <3"

;)

Anyway, yes. Kyoto city-scape:

 

Now we go to the Kiyomizu-dera, where we didn't take many pictures because it was a shrine/temple and it's not very polite to take pictures at holy places (but a lot of tourists, Japanese tourists included, took pictures anyway). We did take a few pictures on the outskirts of the temple, so I'll post those as a wrap up to this post.