Kyoto

Kyoto is the old capital of Japan. We arrived into Osaka Itami Airport on Tuesday evening. We took a bus for nearly an hour to Kyoto, jumped on the subway, and then walked until we found the hotel we booked online. It was a good hotel for the price. The rooms were really small. We dropped our stuff in the room and headed out to eat dinner and look in some shops. The subways and streets were so clean in Kyoto. We found a random restaurant that had no people inside and no menu in English. It was pretty decent. Then we wandered around nearby our hotel. We went to bed pretty early.
We were up and ready by 6:30 in the morning. We rented some bikes from our hotel. We went to find breakfast but nothing was open. There wasn't even a market open. We road around for around an hour. Finally we found a bakery that was open. The only problem is that we had no idea what we were buying to eat. We took our food and waited outside the Nijo castle. There was one out of the three that was tasty. One had some kind of bean paste inside. The other had cabbage, onions, and carrots inside. Let's just say that we were still totally hungry.
Nijo-Jo was built in 1601. It was built as the Kyoto residence of the Shoguns. Nijo Castle has two rings of fortification consisting of a wall and a wide moat. There are two palaces inside, Ninomaru Palace and Honmaru palace. There are two interesting features of the Ninomaru Palace. One is the nightingale floors that were built to sound like birds when anyone walks on them to protect occupants from sneak attacks and assassins. Also, some of the rooms in the house had special doors that body guards could come out and protect them.After Nijo Castle we rode our bikes across town to the Golden Pavilion or Kinkaku-ji. It was built in 1397 as a retirement villa for a shogun. His son turned it into a temple. In 1950 a monk that was obsessed with the temple burned it to the ground. A full reconstruction was completed in 1955.

Kamigamo-jinja was our next stop. This is one of Japan's oldest shrines. It was build in 679 and predates Kyoto. It is dedicated to the god of thunder. There are two large conical sand mounds that represent mountains sculpted for gods to descend upon.
We rode along the river. There was a botanical garden along the way. We peaked our head in but didn't have time to check it out. Our next stop was the Old Imperial Palace. You can't actually go into the palace. Well, you can go in if you apply for permission. We rode around the outside of it. One thing that really bothered me at a number of sites in Japan is that they were surrounded with gravel. It turns out that this site wasn't very interesting.
There was a small road lined with shops leading to the Ginkakuji Temple. This was also build by a Shogun as a retirement villa. The name actually translates to "Silver Pavilion" but the shogun's ambition to cover the pavilion with silver was never realized. After his death it was converted into a temple. The temple was actually under construction so it wasn't much to look at. The gardens were phenomenal. It had meticulously raked cones of sand, a pond in front of the temple, and a path that led up the side of the mountain into the trees. We could see some men maintaining the garden. It looked like painstaking work. I couldn't believe their attention to detail. From up on top of this hill we could see the opposite side of the city where we had been earlier in the day. I couldn't believe how far we had ridden.
We walked down a back street to another temple near by called Honen-In. It was built it 1680 to honor Honen the founder or the Jodo school. This is a secluded temple set back in the woods. There were a couple artists sitting outside the entrance to the temple sketching.
We rode back to the hotel to drop off our bikes and pick up our bags. We were both totally starving but we wanted to see one more area of Kyoto that had multiple temples in a close proximity before catching a bus back to the airport. We jumped on the subway to the southeast part of town. We probably could have spent most of the day in this one area. We arrived less than an before closing. We walked around to see as much as we could in that amount of time. The main temple is Nanzen-Ji. It is a Zen Buddist temple established in 1291 on the site of a previously detached palace. There are several other sub temples and gardens in very close proximity as well as a brick aqueduct. We wish we had more time to see these sites.
We thought we left plenty of time to eat something before grabbing a bus to the airport. Unfortunately Kyoto Station is huge. It was really difficult to figure out where we needed to go to catch a bus to the airport. We tried asking a few times but it didn't help much with the communication barrier. We finally found our way to the bus stop in front of a hotel. We purchased our tickets 3 minutes before the buses departure time.

Brandon felt very sick by the time we arrived at the airport. I think it was a combination of hunger and fatigue. We flew to Tokyo Haneda Airport. Then we traveled by train and subway to Jeanne and Doyle Brown's apartment. The Brown's are close family friends who are currently serving a mission in Tokyo. Jeanne, the angel that she is, had corn chowder, toast, and ice cream sundaes waiting for us. What a lifesaver!