Kyoto Day 2

 The rain yesterday and overnight made everything rather swampy this morning as I went out for my run/swim. My first goal today was to head down to the Inari Taisha shrine on the south side of the city. It's a little over two miles from our hostel, so that plus a little more would get me a decent, 6 mile run. My second goal was to remember how to get back to the hotel.

Kyoto is full of temples and shrines, which is what makes up most of its tourism. The route I took to get to the Inari Taisha shrine took me through a neighborhood that was filled with temples right as they were opening for the day. Temples in Kyoto close their gates until 5:50am. Why that specific time I couldn't find any concrete reason. That said, it was a pretty awesome run through streets lined with temple walls and gates.

I also ran through a neighborhood with some pretty narrow roads. In Japan, the width of the road has no bearing on the vehicles that drive down it, nor is it ever shown on a map, so half the time you are stuck debating whether it's a road or someone's driveway.

This is one reason cars are smaller here. This is a city street.

I was enjoying the run so much, I kind of lost track of how close I was getting to the Inari shrine, so I was a bit taken aback when I turned a corner to see a huge compound emerge from the side of the mountain I was running alongside of.

The Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine is a famous Shinto shrine built into the side of a mountain and has over a thousand vermillion torii gates. You may have seen them in the movie "Memoirs of a Geisha". It's pretty spectacular, but a very popular, and usually very crowded, site. This morning there was just me and a rather jet-lagged woman and the staff, so I was able to get an unobstructed shot of the main temple. Sumi and I will be visiting the shrine a bit later.

Heading back to the hostel, I needed a little extra distance to reach 6 miles, so I ran up by Honganji, an enormous Buddhist temple practically across the street from our hostel.

Buddhist service here every morning at 7

Sumi actually came up here right as I was finishing my run to sit in on the Buddhist service, so I hung out outside of the temple and listened. I was a hot sweaty mess after running in the humidity, so I wasn't about to inflict that on the people at the service. The singing and chimes were resonant and traveled well out of the temple, so it was pretty cool to hear it being performed. It was quite brief, and soon Sumi and I headed back to the hostel to get cleaned up before heading up to Kinkakuji, the golden shrine.

Kinkakuji is on the north side of town, and we foolishly decided to head up there during rush hour. Now it's not as bad as you have likely heard, with people stuffing passengers into train cars and all that. First of all, that was Tokyo, and second, they stopped doing that a while back. But still, these trains and buses were packed. When you're taller than most everyone in the country, it's not so bad, but for someone like Sumi, you can't see anything but people pressing in on all sides. A claustrophobic person would have a rough time in a Japanese subway during peak hours. 

We chose that time because we wanted to be at Kinkakuji right when it opened to avoid tourists and such. Well THAT was a mistake. Numerous tour buses had been parked outside the temple before they opened, so when we got there, roughly 3000 other people were already waiting to get in. Regardless, they were very good at getting people in and created enough places for unobstructed photos that it turned out to not be as bad as it could have been.

Probably even more spectacular on a sunny day

 After enjoying the temple area, we headed down to Fushimi Inari Taisha to walk up the mountain and through all the torii gates. Apparently Tourist Thursday is a thing, and bigger than Taco Tuesday. It was a madhouse of mostly foreign tourists taking selfies and being all around pretty clueless. After the rush hour madness, the crowded Kinkakuji, and now tons of loud tourists, introverts that we are, we had enough and needed to get away from the masses for a bit, so we cut our visit short and are planning on coming back tomorrow morning early before all the foreigners descend on the shrine. We did get to see a bit of the torii and the many different fox okami guardians. The foxes have various objects under their paws or in their mouths, like keys, gems, scrolls, etc. It is common for all the foxes in a shrine to be unique designs, and there are many different ones in Fushimi.

Holding a scroll in its mouth

It's tail is on fire

Holding rice in its mouth

Holding a key in its mouth

A rare, tourist-less shot of the torii

The backs of each torii have some inscription,
often the name of the person or company that
donated it.

After spending way too much time trying to decide where to eat lunch, we settled on a tiny Indian place near the station, which was getting more and more crowded as the weekend approaches. The restaurant looked like a takeout place from the outside but there were actually a few tables inside. The first table they tried to seat us at was up against a stairway with a sloped ceiling that came down so low it was practically at the table level. There was no way I was fitting in there. Luckily they had one other table open, so all was good. I can't believe we didn't take a picture of the place, but they had very good handmade garlic naan and good vegetarian curry. 

The rest of the day was spent on administrative stuff for the rest of the trip: booking hotels and tickets on the <sigh> Hello Kitty themed Shinkansen. Looking forward to a quite trip to the shrine tomorrow morning and a visit to the Gion district, another area used in "Memoirs of a Geisha" and the location of the famous Hanamikoji road. 

One last picture for the day. The hostel advertises an LCD TV in the room as a feature. They didn't lie, there is a flat screen TV in the room...A 13" diagonal TV.

The iPad has a 12.9" screen