Some think Kyoto is all quaint shops and beauty. It is, but there’s so much more than that. Maybe it’s because it’s the old capital. Nowhere else do you feel the contradictions more strongly: time-honored tradition living next to modern amenities; something as mundane as seeing two geisha clad in kimono walking next to a taxi. The men who frequent Gion have changed their clothes as the times pass, yet till now it is the wealthy businessmen who look to entertain and be entertained, in their dapper, dreary business suits, that sing and laugh with geisha in the comfort of the teahouses overlooking the river. Not everything Arthur Golden says is true, but it’s not all false either. As tourists throng to the temples frantically snapping away with their cameras, there remains the crowd of people that stays the same, going back to the temple year after year, month after month, praying for this or that. The wooden plaques always say the same things; human nature changes very little. Many things have changed, but there is still hope. 

Here, young girls still guide their hopeful friends, hands clasped and eyes closed, towards the sunshine and in search of love.

Day 1: Kinkaku-ji, Gion.

So! We arrived in Kyoto, half an hour away from Osaka, without any mishap. We only spent two days here, but there is a shitload of pictures, because the whole place is just beautiful. 

This time our inn was a little out of the way (five stops away from Kyoto station), but since we were only staying there for two nights, we figured it didn’t really matter. It turned out to be a really good choice, since the innkeeper was a genial old man who thought we were from Hong Kong and tried speaking broken Cantonese to us (imagine trying to convince him in broken English that English was better!) and the room was lovely. There was a little garden outside in the courtyard area, and it was just lovely. You know, like Japanese.

After we dumped our stuff at the inn (a very tiring endeavour considering there are no lifts in the station up to ground), we trooped off to Kyoto Station to take a bus to Kinkaku-ji (金閣寺). There are subways in Kyoto, but it is one of the most well-planned cities in Japan. The streets, unlike Tokyo, have signs, and the naming actually makes sense. Like New York, it’s divided into avenues and streets, so it’s much easier to get around using the buses rather than just the subways.

Throughout our trip there were so many school kids. So many!

Kinkaku-ji is the informal name of Rokuon-ji (鹿苑寺, Deer Garden Temple). It was originally built as a villa but was later converted into a Zen temple. The most famous part of this place is of course the golden pavilion itself, which sits at the edge of a large pond lined with irises. We were lucky, because late May to early June was the iris season, so we got to see these flowers in full bloom. Sadly I did not know this when I was there, so I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have. Nevertheless, they were beautiful.

The golden pavilion is covered in gold leaf. It has three storeys and each storey is done up in a different style. We were not allowed to go in… but it was lovely, as you can see. The gold leaf apparently weighs something like 40 kilograms or something.

There was a tiny little garden which had a teahouse where people could stop. It is not so obvious that it is a tourist gimmick, or maybe it is, since I saw alot of Japanese there as well, but it was lovely. The garden is shady, the trees are tall, and in spring, the weather was cool but the sun was bright. 

I guess I should kind of apologise for the lack of pictures in this place. It was about this time that I discovered my camera was running out of battery, so I was really sparing with the shots after I took like about 4543654 different versions of the golden pavilion earlier on. 

Surprisingly, though it was hard to get all those people out of the way (believe me, it was way more crowded than it looks here…) I have so many versions of the same picture. But that’s the wonder of digital cameras…

So, we went back to Kuramaguchi, where our inn was, and rested for an hour or two while my battery got charged up. Then we got ready to go to Gion at night.

Gion, as you can see for yourself, is kind of amazing. It may be a textbook cliche place now filled with random tourists, but it’s still beautiful and you can’t not see it. It’s connected to Shijo (四条), the main shopping street, by a bridge, and is separated by the river, which runs and runs and just runs. There are seagulls that pick at food in the running water, young couples stroll and sit by the edge, while the teahouses perch over balancing on bamboo poles.

Still the main clientele here is all local; all Japan. It’s still the same grey-suited businessmen, every night, paying for the geisha by the incense stick. Okay honestly. Words do not do this place justice. There are passageways always leading off somewhere, to nowhere. 

If there wasn’t enough proof that old and new can co-exist, here is an upbeat Italian restaurant nestled in the nooks and crannies of Gion, with a small unobtrusive sign, just like the rest of the restaurants in the area. Everything is quiet and hush-hush, and there is a great air of reverence in the area. I can’t explain it; it’s not like there isn’t noise, because there should be and always is, but Gion to me somehow is one of those places that replays itself in silent mode when you pull it out of your memory.

We walked out of Gion and past the bridge again, stopping to look at the river by night. It is kind of breathtaking. It really is. The restaurants that teeter on stilts over the running water look quaint by day, but by night they light up the entire place with small points of light, while the water itself remains dark. There are couples that sit by the river, but it is dark now, and they just stare into the water, while the revellers above go crazy, even the angmohs that I could spy from the bridge on the top floor of a building. I took pictures. As you can see.

We also stopped by a teahouse on the way out for dessert. We wanted to have dinner first, but the teahouse closed at 7.30, so we ended up having dessert before dinner. WIN! It was good though. As you can tell. And cost us $13 (1050 yen).

I must say that we walked a really long time in search of dinner, by which time I was getting very, very grumpy. I was half-ready to give up and not eat when J decided to bring us up to this random restaurant after being enticed by the huge poster downstairs. Which is how we ended up that monstrous thing in a half Korean/Chinese restaurant, where the assistant chef was Taiwanese.

We sat down here too, after dinner. We talked about everything and nothing for two hours. 

The top picture shows Shijo, and the bottom Karasuma-dori, which is on the opposite bank of the river from Gion. They are about maybe 25m apart from each other, which still amazes me even now.

Here is our lovely inn: Aoi-So. The garden courtyard is really cute, and if you’re me, you can sleep anywhere. Japan is really clean, so staying anywhere is not a problem, really. 

Day 2: Kiyomizu-dera Temple, Heian-Jingu Shrine, the Kyoto Library, the Kyoto Museum of Art.

The next day, bright and early, we headed off to Kiyomizu-dera Temple (清水寺), which takes its name from the nearby waterfall that runs through the grounds of the temple. It is best known for its veranda, supported by hundreds of pillars, that juts out from the hillside and offers great views of the city below. 

Well. Since it was on the hill, this naturally meant we had to walk all the way up. It was a really hot day, and we didn’t dress for it, but thankfully we didn’t die too badly. As you can see, the middle school girls are still in their winter/spring uniforms and also dying, which made us feel slightly better about ourselves as we walked up the hill under the scorching sun. 

Before that we stopped at Kyoto Station to have brunch: which consisted of ramen and don. And lots and lot of tea. 

It’s quite a long walk up, but it’s worth it… you’ll see.

When we finally got there, well. It was kind of amazing. The thing about hot days is that the sky is a brilliant shade of blue and is totally cloudless; which makes for great pictures. The colours are amazing; but honestly the temple really looked like this that day. There are a lot of schoolchildren, as you can see.

The bottom left picture shows the view from the mini-balcony, before the main entrance to Kiyomizu. You can see Kyoto down below, and everyone walking up the slope towards the temple (the top right picture, below). 

There are many, many wishes recorded here; some of them are cute (“I want to go to NHK Hall!”) and the others nostalgic (“I want to pass the high school entrance exam”; we saw this particular one 4634656 times). 

The thing about school trips (as I have learnt, the hard way) is that there must always be a point to these excursions. So eventually students are armed with a worksheet or checklist of some sort and slowly run around the entire temple ticking off things they’ve done (e.g. ask a foreigner how to say this in English) and generally being crazy school kids snapping lots of pictures. 

It’s good to be young. It is. Here are shots of the hillside, and the veranda I was talking about. It’s huge and old and you can see it slanting downwards, but nobody cares, and it’s been there since 400 years anyway. It’s not going to collapse anytime soon. 

Yes. The grass really is greener on the other side sometimes.

Note the Hello Kitty figure tied to the pole! 

The temple is also famous for other things. It has a shrine (自主神社) dedicated to a god of love and “good matches”. The shrine possesses a pair of love stones placed 18m apart, and people will attempt to walk between them with their eyes closed. If you succeed in reaching the other stone with your eyes closed, you will find love. Friends can help you, but it means there will be an intermediary in real life. And so, as we walked past, we saw hopeful schoolgirls with their eyes scrunched up in hope, their friends laughing and gently guiding them along the way. 

I didn’t take pictures because it was too private, but it was worth it to see their surprised and happy faces when they opened their eyes to see the other stone. It reminded me that love is still an ideal that schoolgirls dream of, everywhere. 

Some of the stuff written on the plaques is kind of heartwarming; others are heartbreaking. The one on the top right says: 彼女とずっと一緒にいられますように (his handwriting is very nice, by the way; I wish my girlfriend and I to be together forever). The one on the bottom left reminded me of Charlene and the way she writes her Chinese (haha). 

And the one on the bottom right is in Chinese: 良好姻缘快出现。。。30岁前有人 or 没有误会没有等错人 (I hope a good match quickly appears, before I am thirty. The alternative wish was for there to have been no misunderstanding. To not to have mistakenly waited for the wrong person.)

The temple is also known as a haven for students wishing for graduation, and is well known for having trees with paper wishes (omikuji; おみくじ) tied to their branches by the hopeful. 

After that, we headed for Heian-Jingu Shrine (平安神宮). To get there we passed by the Kyoto Museum of Art, where there was a Monet exhibition, and the Kyoto Prefectural Library. We had all the time in the world, so we stopped to take a look, flailed over the Monet and debated whether we should buy prints, got a drink from the vending machine at the playground outside the library. Then J took pictures of me on a swing from like 9 different angles.

The shrine is famous for its gardens, the torii before the main gate (one of the largest in Japan). The main building is designed to imitate the Kyoto Imperial Palace on a 75% scale, and was built in 1895 for the 1,100th anniversary of the establishment of Heiankyo (平安京, the old name of Kyoto) and dedicated to Emperor Kanmu and Emperor Komei. Emperor Komei was the last emperor to have his capital in Kyoto, before Emperor Meiji moved the capital to Tokyo after his ascension to the throne. 

There is a lot of colour in this place. There are omikuji trees randomly placed, the shrine doors are bright red, and the fruit trees are orange with all the mikans dangling from them.

Heian-Jingu, being somewhat a replica of the Imperial Palace, has really great gardens. Walking through them is like walking through time and space. And you feel… a lot of peace.

Charlotte the spider is here too, spinning her web against the sunlight as always. The spiderwebs here are amazing and they are huge, but this was the only one I managed to photograph properly. The rest are so huge but so invisible; it took me ages to see them and not walk through them, and yet… they were beautiful.

In this garden we saw a couple making out (bottom left picture, above), so everyone who walked into the garden hurriedly walked across to the other side of the pond. It was only both of us who decided to sit down on the bench at the other side to make up stories about the background of these two (middle-aged) people, who didn’t look like they were married at all. 

Still, the Japanese have a great sense of beauty. It was May, but there were still autumn trees, where their leaves will be red all year round in a sea of green. 

Also, things you don’t notice when you actually take pictures: a heart-shaped blob of water on a lily pad. It was landscape when J first took the picture, but I only saw it when I downloaded it off the camera and rotated it. The trees… they look kind of wistful, don’t they? Like, old and feathery. Weathered with age, still hanging on. Then there is us, being young and happy and loud.

I had way too much fun on these stones.

Let me assure you that it was not easy to sit down on these rocks in a dress and not drop my bag at the same time. Plus, that woman (half of the duo that was making out at the pond earlier; I ended up helping them take so many pictures) was wearing high heels!!!

In this kind of garden you kind of expect everything to be beautiful. It’s like you half-expect a pretty Japanese girl in glorious kimono to step out of the shade with an umbrella. 

There is exactly one red tree in every garden. Only one, and the effect is marvellous.

After this we went back to Shijo for a second time and went shopping around the area, then went back to the river facing Gion and sat by it again. We talked about the bicycles that clinked their bells in the dark, walked by the backs of restaurants, tried to peer in through the windows to see fully dresed-up geisha entertaining clients, sat down and listened to Alone in Kyoto while savouring the night wind. We were generally happy. I’m always happy when I’m travelling. And it sounds trite, but romantic things… they always make you feel happier when you’re in love.

♥

(The rest of the album is here.

The rest of the posts are here: Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Tokyo.)