Kyoto
Trip Start
Oct 20, 2008
1
48
93
Trip End
Jan 31, 2009
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Kyoto,
Kinki,
Japan
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
saw a McDonald's sign at the food arcade of kyoto station. its amazing how American fastfood chains have become places of refuge for me. ordered a breakfast sandwich and an orange juice; sat down; took out my LP and started searching for a place to stay.
after checking out 2 places near kyoto station and learning that they were full, found a ryokan (a traditional Japanese guest house) in the same neighborhood. ryokan heianbo was asking for $70 for a single room without a bathroom. during this journey, i have very rarely paid over $30 for lodging. tried bargaining. i had forgotten that they don`t do that in japan. the place seemed extremely clean and cosy, and i was desperate for a good night`s sleep. reminding myself that japan was the most expensive country that i would visit, i checked in.
after dropping off my large backpack, went to a nearby starbucks to plan my day. decided to visit some religious sights in the higashiyama neighborhood, north of kyoto station.
noticed that kyoto doesn`t have much of a subway system. there are only 2 lines, one vertical and one horizontal, forming a plus in downtown.
Kyoto
kyoto was much smaller (the population size is almost a twelfth of Tokyo`s) and more modest than Tokyo. remember the middle-income photos that i had taken? those kinds of images are much more frequently found in kyoto. however, there still are tall office buildings and luxurious shops in the downtown area. what makes kyoto special is the numerous temples and shrines that have been scattered all over the city. they are as prolific as the mosques in Istanbul. the religious buildings become more impressive as you approach the hillside forests surrounding the city center.
my first stop was the kiyomizu-dera, a UNESCO world heritage sight. although the complex was impressive architecturally (similar to senso-ji in Tokyo), i couldn`t enjoy it spiritually due to the influx of tourists. after that, i visited a few other temples and parks. my favorite was the 13th century chion-in. even though the giant wooden building and the golden ornamentations inside were attractive, the main reason why i enjoyed chion-in so much is because of the service that the Buddhist monks were carrying out. no Islamic or Christian has ever affected me as deeply as these Buddhist ceremonies have. perhaps it`s just because i had never seen a Buddhist service before. by the way, there were some honorary guests attending the service with the monks, while the rest of us watched it from behind a fence.
went to a Shinto shrine called heian-jingu where a baptism-like ceremony was being carried out.
i am yet to see a church in japan. i know that emperors have not been hospitable to missionaries, but why have they done so poorly after world war 2 as well?
wanted to take a nap from 5 till 6pm, but ended up sleeping until 10pm. went to the 24 hour place where the bus had dropped me off to get some rice, beef with onions and green tea for 4,000 yens. this place operated on an unusual system. you select your food and pay into a vending machine. in return, it gives you a ticket that you pass on to the waiter. this way they have eliminated the need for a cashier.
there was an interesting passage in LP that mentioned the Japanese tendency to learn from the best. japan emulated china all the way from the 6th century all the way up to the Meiji restoration. since japan opened up to the west in 1868, they have been learning heavily from the united states. the learning curve has steepened especially after their world war 2 defeat. hence, the remarkable Americanization of the big Japanese cities...
