Day Eleven: Kyoto, Part Two

Saturday morning greeted us with pouring rain. Disappointed but not discouraged we dragged ourselves out of the room and in search of umbrellas. Search ended very quickly: hotel lobby sported an umbrella dispenser. BTW, umbrellas in Japan are ubiquitous, you can buy them on practically every corner, most public places have umbrella stands at the entrances (you just stick your umbrella in and when you come back it's still there!), and places that don't have stands give you special umbrella bags. After arming ourselves we slightly revised our planned itinerary and headed to Nijojo (Nijo Castle).

The castle was built by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603 and served as the Kyoto home to Tokugawa shoguns. It's quite different from what a Westerner would expect a castle to be, a lot simpler and much more elegant than European Medieval castles. It is surrounded by a moat and a wall with guard towers at the corners and one entrance point: over the bridge and through a massive gate.

The main building, Ninomaru (secondary castle) Palace, that to us looked simply like an overgrown house, had 33 rooms, all traditionally bare of furniture and decorated with beautiful screens, carvings and wall paintings that we could hardly see because only natural light was available and whatever there was of it on this rainy day was being blocked by the outside sliding doors with paper covered windows.

So we wondered around through the dark rooms straining to see anything of the interior and listening to the famous nightingale floors, designed specially for the paranoid shogun so they would creak in warning whenever somebody walked through the corridors. In fact, the shogun was so paranoid that he had bodyguard alcoves scattered around many rooms and only allowed women servants into his private quarters. That last one makes very little sense to me, I think women can be just as dangerous and often a lot more inventively treacherous than man. No pictures were allowed to be taken inside.

Outside the palace is a very well designed garden, which is actually a more modern addition to the grounds, there were no trees outside during Shogunate times.

Enclosed inside the grounds behind another moat and a bridged gate is Honmaru ("main castle"), but unlike the Ninomaru the current building is not the original, that was destroyed by fire in 18th century (a very common fate of many historical Japanese structures), another building was moved there from the Imperial Palace in 1893.

The surrounding wall of Honmaru also provides a nice view of the palace grounds.

From Nijo Castle, still being pelted by rain, we moved on to the Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion). This is likely the most famous site and image of Kyoto.

Kinkakuji was constructed in the 1390s as a retirement villa for Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, but this structure is not the original one. In 1950 some insane monk burned the pavilion to the ground and this is a reconstruction, the gold leaf now covering the walls is 5 times thicker than the original. It's still beautiful.

As expected the pavilion is surrounded by a garden.

I am not sure what tossing your coin into a dish is supposed to get you but a large crowd of people were trying their luck. Lena joined them and almost made it. On her last try the coin bounced right out of the cup.

Last site on the compulsory agenda was Ryoanji Temple with its famous Zen rock garden. I was most interested in the garden. It's supposed to be very peaceful and meditative. In one word - Zen. It wasn't. There were way too many people around snapping pictures and making noise. Actually, I am not a very Zen person and some rocks scattered on the sand did nothing to change that, so I joined the snapping pictures crowd and did my best to get the whole garden into one shot. It didn't quite work.

Those who wanted to see all the rocks in one go could meditate on the small model of the garden inside.

We also walked around the rest of the temple grounds.

Just as we turned to go on our way to the largest Japanese Arts and Crafts store in Kyoto the sun finally emerged and we made one more stop - at the Heian Shrine. It's a pretty modern deal and I didn't like it much, too bright and orange. There were also preparations for a concert going on inside the gates so we didn't go inside the shrine, just took a look around the grounds.

I already discussed enough shopping details, so I'll skip our visit to the store and just mention that for me it was a bit more of a success than my previous attempts.

In the evening Lena picked an interesting dinner place that was supposed to have some good stuff served on skewers. Well, this was our first failure in locating a place. We walked and walked and even tried to call them to no avail and finally even I had to give it up for a lost cause. So we went to some sushi place that was much too touristy and not all that great.

Next entry will be dedicated to Nara so even though this last portion was photographed on Sunday morning it fits here a lot better. Before going to the station we took few minutes to walk through the geisha quarter one more time. Of course no self-respecting geisha would be up at 8 o'clock in the morning, so we didn't get to see any.

Complete album:
Kyoto, Day Two