Kyoto wonders

After a 2-hour and 40 minute ride on the Shinkansen (bullet train), we arrived in Kyoto. First of all, the train station is huge. It's like a train station and a mall combined, very special. It took us 10 minutes to exit the station and find ourselves in front of Kyoto Tower, a tower that seems like a radio transmission tower in orange and white.

Our backpackers hostel is 10 minutes from the station, but with our backpacks on, it felt like 30. We finally arrived to the hostel, K's Hostel. The people at the desk are very nice and there's also a cafe attached to it, so it's even cooler. But the surprise was that one of the (Japanese!) receptionists started to talk to us in Hebrew! Apparently he was there volunteering for 6 months and he really liked the place. He's even thinking of coming back to study for a year! He's the second Japanese person we met who has lived in Israel and liked it. Funny.

Anyway, it was already 16:00 and we hadn't eaten lunch so we were starving and looked for a place to go. This guy recommended us a Japanese restaurant not far from the hostel that serves udon (soup based noodle dish) and other stuff like that. The service was great (as usual here) and we were ready to visit the city and see the night life around Gion.

We were looking for Geishas and apparently it was the area to find them. The Gion area looks like what Kyoto was like 150 years ago. Small wooden houses, people dressed in traditional Japanese clothes, almost no cars.

Even if the area has mostly expensive restaurants that only business men go to and expensive shops, it's still a beautiful place to walk around and it definitely reminded us that we were not in Tokyo anymore.

Kyoto seemed quite like Tokyo when we exited the train station, but now we see the obvious difference.

We finished with the local "Red light district" where we saw a (drunk) geisha holding a business man on the way to find a taxi. To rest after all the drinking, apparently. She was in full make up and garb - i was very exciting for us.

The next day we started our Kyoto tour by seeing the 2 main highlights of the city (according to Rony): The Bamboo forest in Arashiyama and the Fushimi Inari Shrine with its thousands of orange tori.

First came the Bamboo forest. We took the train to Arashiyama, which cost us nothing since we have the JR Pass. After a 20-minute ride, we arrived at the Saga-Arashiyama station and started to walk toward the bamboo grove, about a 20-minute walk from there.

On the way, Rony decided he wanted to buy mandarines that were for sale on the street. They were just on a stand in front of a house and there was a small box for money deposit. Just like in New Caledonia. So he bought some. After tasting them, we understood why nobody was there: They were sour like lemon and not edible. So we just threw them away. Too bad.

Buying the sour mandarins

The town itself looks like a typical Japanese suburb/small town and we fell in love with it. We totally saw ourselves living in such a place, where everything seems so peaceful and pretty.

Then we arrived at the bamboo forest. What an amazing view! Bamboo trees all around us and above us. With all those trees, it felt like a giant green dome above us, protecting us.

Bamboo grove

In the bamboo forest. Rony still has his mandarins... for now

 On our way back to the train station, we passed by Kameyama Park and Hozu river, which both held beautiful scenery.

Hozu River

Sweet japanese baker

It was now time for Fushimi Inari Shrine, but for that we had to pass through the Kyoto train station. And since we were at the station and it was lunch time, then why not eat? So we passed by a Japanese fast food establishment that looked like this:

If you don't know what it is and wonder what the hell this slot machine is and how it's related to food, then we completely understand you :) This is actually the menu of the restaurant and the machine is a self ordering machine: You enter the amount your dish costs, you select the dish you want, and the machine gives you a ticket that you hand to the cook inside the restaurant. And 25 seconds later, your dish is on the counter ready to eat. Amazing, cool, awesome! Not to mention delicious!

 While we were wondering what we're going to eat, and trying to figure out the different dishes, a nice Japanese guy came out of the restaurant for help. He was very nice and helpful, and started to talk to Shanainai about Kyoto and other stuff while Rony and Talia went to eat. But after 30 minutes it started to be a bit long and Talia came to the rescue and Shanainai could finally eat.

In our defense, Talia went to check on Shanainai several times and see if she needed help, but the answer was always no. We're guessing that the guy just wanted to practice his English and found a perfect occasion to do so. Usually when Japanese people come to us to talk in English, it's just to ask where we're from. But this time it was different.

We finally got to Fushimi Inari Shrine and it met all our expectations - and even exceeded them: Everything was orange (Rony's favorite color) from the giant tori at the entrance to the temples, to the shops, fences, stalls.

And that was only the beginning: We started to climb the mountain behind the temple and pass through the infinite number of orange tori. It was exactly as we saw it in pictures:

Rony climbed and ran all around with a big smile on his face and Talia took an endless number of photos. Really a unique experience. It's a good thing we have an 8 GB memory card!

The Fushimi Inari Taisha (shrine) is dedicated to the god Inari and Inari is also the name of the mountain where the shrine is located. Inari is the shinto god of fertility, agriculture and rice and it is symbolized by a fox. So we saw many statues of foxes there.

By the time we left and got back to the hostel, it was 16:00 and all the other places we wanted to go were already closed. So we decided to do some shopping and to get rid of a few kilos off our backpacks and send them back home. They will probably arrive 2 months after we get home, but it's OK. 6.6 kilos less is quite significant if you don't carry them for a month. :)

This time we decided to eat at the hostel, and we had some salad we bought at the 7-Eleven and called it a day. We were still tired from the day before and we decided to rest.

Since we didn't see half of the places we wanted to, we decided that the next day Rony would go on his own, at his own pace and see the places he wanted to see the most, and Talia and Shanainai would go see their preferred places.

But that's for another post :)

Pics from Kyoto: 

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=608314&id=906005363&l=7dd6ec49d7