Day 7: Kyoto Walking Tour

Walk in Kyoto

We spent 5 hours of today with a small group on a Kyoto walking tour, which had been recommended to me by another student in my beginners Japanese class a while ago (sadly I didn't pick the language up too well, but got by in Japan just fine anyway), and is called 'Walk in Kyoto, Talk in English'. I'm not really one for group tours but I liked the idea of seeing 'real' Kyoto, including places where people work hand crafting things like buddhist rosary beads, paper fans, and pottery which Kyoto is famous for.

We also crossed the Kamo river, and went to some shrines and temples, and it was interesting to have some of the rituals and context explained to us as up until now we've been mostly getting by through guesswork based on observation! We learnt about the yakuza (and passed their headquarters, although no photographs for obvious reasons!), and stopped off for a tea and sweet. The tea definitely got mixed reactions from our group but the sweets were ok.

An ex-Geisha house

The original Nintendo headquarters. Still owned by Nintendo.

A local temple

A small shrine on the street,
to meet the needs of the busy Japanese lifestyle

Kamo river

A local specialty tea, and a plum sweet

It's really nothing like England

The group we were with was really nice and from a variety of countries- a Danish couple from Copenhagen, two Germans (who didn't realise each other were German initially and spent the first chunk of the tour speaking in English to each other!), and a Peruvian Canadian.

We learnt about the requirement to have a bucket of water outside each house (I'm not convinced they would be much help in the case of a fire though!), passed tiny local craft shops which even though they were closed left their wares on display outside with a box for the money, and went to temples which are not on the usual tourist routes and were able to observe local people practising their religion in a day to day kind of way. The history of religion in Japan is really interesting, and Shinto seems a fun religion!!! I won't go into it in this post because I wouldn't do the subject justice, but I would recommend reading just a little bit about it if you were to visit Kyoto because it definitely enhanced our enjoyment of the shrines and temples we saw from then on.

Washing our hands and mouths, part of the ritual before prayer

A small shrine, for marriage

We stayed with two of the group after the tour ended and we went to find Kiyomizu-dera temple after the tour which was fun.

Kiyomizu-dera was really interesting with lots going on, and had beautiful views. It was really really busy though!

After we parted ways we went shopping for a bit (I finally found some more underwear just as I thought I was going to have to crack and wash clothes on my honeymoon, hallelujah!), and we found a hello kitty store which was adorable and I wanted to live there. After that we had a walk down Pontocho and found a restaurant for dinner.

It was quite a quiet restaurant but I think we were there quite early, and we found a new favourite sake. We remembered the name of the sake from the menu and asked for it in a shop, but I have no idea if what we bought is the one we had in the restaurant, I hope so though as it was lovely.

We inexplicably failed to find Gion, but exhausted after a long day of walking decided the best course of action would be to head back to the hotel and consult google and try again tomorrow (I had forgotten to charge the portable wifi the night before typically). Unfortunately we ran out of time the next day so we actually missed Gion entirely! Hopefully we'll get the chance to go back one day and rectify that mistake. On the way back to the hotel we stopped off in the station for a quick yakitori snack which was pretty nice! Oh and Aaron grabbed a doriyaki on the way through another station which we shared and was tasty, we were all about the snack foods in Japan!

Next post: Day 8: Arashiyama!