First Kyoto Trip: Final Days

While next week, I intend for these posts to be about Iida, a city in Nagano Prefecture where we would be living for the next eight weeks, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about my final day in Kyoto. The day following our adventures on Arashiyama (see previous post), we had a free day to explore Kyoto on our own. And I forgot it on my last post, but here's a picture of me feeding the monkey's on Arashiyama.

The majority of our group agreed that we should grab lunch at the kaitenzushi restaurant one more time and after we stuffed our faces full of sushi, we wanted to explore the twin rivers that join to form the Kamo River in the North of Kyoto. The bank of the river is a very popular spot in Kyoto, especially for couples, and that day was no exception. There was even one portion of the bank that was large enough to hold a few fields where people were playing ultimate Frisbee.

While we waited for our food to settle, we parked ourselves in the grass on the bank and watched as the river rolled by. After a few days of rain, it was incredibly relaxing to be able to sit in the sunshine while a breeze swept through as gently as the river. It took a bit to snap us out of our serenity, but once we were aroused from our sushi-induced coma, we decided to see what was on the other side of the river.

After walking up the bank for a while, we came across the entrance to the Kyoto Botanical Garden. We thought this a great way to spend a few hours on a sunny day, but upon learning that entrance would cost 1,600 yen, about $15 USD, half of us had second thoughts. I was among that half and so rather than enter the gardens, we chose instead to catch a bus back to downtown Kyoto and do some souvenir shopping. This was gonna be our last real opportunity to do any shopping in Kyoto for the rest of the trip and the shopping district is not something to be missed when visiting the city, even if you’re like me and more of a window shopper than actual customer.

For me, the draw of the Kyoto shopping district is not only the seemingly endless maze of side streets upon side streets filled with shops, but also the diversity of items sold at these shops. I’ll grant you, majority of the shops are for clothes as Kyoto is particularly known for fashion, albeit not nearly as well-known as Harajuku in Tokyo. However, there were shops for all manner of interests from music to books to games as well as hometown markets and restaurants. And let’s not forget the game centers. It almost seemed as if there was one on ever street, and there very well may have been, each filled with the same vexing claw machines. I watched as some of my friends poured yen after yen into those machines for a prize usually worth less than the amount spent trying. It was more for the novelty of winning the prize rather than buying it that ensnared so many victims.

By this point it was getting rather late in the day, so we decided to head back to the hostel to get ready for our trip to Iida the following day.  But we couldn’t resist making one more stop to see the Kyoto Imperial Palace. Unbeknownst to us, you aren’t actually permitted to enter the palace, but visitors are more than welcome to walk the palace grounds.

The imperial palace grounds rank rather high on my list of places to see while in Kyoto, right up there with Kinkakuji and Arashiyama. The grounds are stunning, I’m told even more so when the sakura bloom in the spring, but I didn't make it back to Kyoto during sakura season. While beautiful, the scene is also incredibly peaceful. All the noise of the bustling city is drowned to silence on the grounds and it’s almost as if all the troubles of the world wash away.  My professor, Martin Holman, told us that it was on those very grounds that he had his epiphany in life that he wanted to pursue Japanese language and culture for his career.  While I wasn’t able to decide my future that day on the grounds, the quietness and calm nestled amongst the tranquil trees certainly left an impression I won’t soon forget.

Useful phrase in this week's post:

sakura - さくら - 桜

meaning: cherry blossoms