This is why i love leaving the city

Nature!

There is really a lot of nice nature in Japan. Many places are absolutely magical. This place on the pic above made me think of my grandfather, he would absolutely love living here. A very nice landscaped garden with many different things growing, in the middle there is a temple that is so in contact with nature that it was hard to tell when I was outside and when i was inside. The calm and the fresh air and the nice little paths everywhere to just walk in peace.

We were in Kyoto. We stayed two nights at one of the nicest hotels I’ve been at. We just took the cheapest available alternative from hotels.com but that turned out really great! It cost just 800 SEK per night for two people.

The first day we arrived early enough to check out one temple. So we went to this one in the hills called Kiyomizu. It’s was really cool, and according to wikipedia, the entire thing was built without using any nails.

We walked for maybe 20-30 minutes up a hill about this steep:

During most of the days we were gone (especially in Kyoto) the weather changed really rapidly and rain showers came and went, though we had that covered!

When we got to the top, we were stunned by how far up we had actually gone, and this was the view.

The temple up there was really stunning and i can image how serene and peaceful it must be to live there.

The day after we started our marathon of tourism and temple viewing. We went through pretty much everything Kyoto had to offer, getting around by a number of bus-lines, some train and even taxi to make it in time for closing hours.

Kyoto is full of culture, that’s what it’s known for. And we were able to check of the following things:

All in all it was really a wonderful experience and personally I wouldn’t have wanted more time with the sights, just seeing them, walking through and taking some pictures is enough to take in the awe. With all the tourists around it’s really hard to get any longer lasting feeling of greatness. Tourism kind of destroys most of these things.

We got a little funny story too. We went to visit the Imperial Palace but all we found were these endlessly long walls protecting it. The walls seemed new so Emma wanted to feel the wall to see what it was made of. She jumped over the little trough between the wall and the walkway and felt the wall and all of a sudden an alarm started sounding very loudly.

It turns out the place was guarded by laser-alarms so if anyone got too close to the wall it broke the laser and the alarm went off.

Luckily no guard showed up or anything. I think the place had video surveillance as well so they saw we were just stupid tourists.

By the night we got some nice time in the center of the town to get a small taste of Kyotos nightlife as well.

The whole city had a much calmer atmosphere and people seemed a bit more traditional. But it also seemed a bit poorer, the streets were all pretty small and all the houses were pretty worn down. It was nice, but I wouldn’t trade it for Tokyo any day.