Day 9 - Temples

We had an early start this morning, as we had been advised by the guidebook to get to the places we wanted to visit early and avoid the swarms of tourists. Unfortunately this meant that we were incredibly sleepy when we tried to figure out the Kyoto subway and bus services- not a good move. After accidentally getting the wrong ticket (which, in our defence, was understandable, as all the instructions were in Japanese, and what Englsh there was was labelled wrong) we bought ourselves a day pass and got the subway then the bus to the North-West of Kyoto. We then accidentally found a temple, which turned out to be Ninna-Ji, as a result of being majorly confused by the bus and getting off a stop after the one that we meant to. This was no bad thing, though, because the temple we found was practically empty but very tranquil and beautiful.

After exploring our hidden treasure for a while, we moved on to the temple that we had actually been aiming for in the first place, Ryoan-Ji. There, we saw a big lake with ducks and herons and even more fishies, as well as a calm rock garden with 15 rocks in it (although you can only ever see 14 at a time, apparently).

Next, we went to Kinkaku-Ji, also known as The Golden Pavillion, which is one of the most famous places to visit in Kyoto. By this time, it was starting to get very very hot, and so we decided to take a break on a bench in the shade and eat some ice-creams, whilst listening to some Americans who were getting more and more infuriated by a map that they seemed unable to fold back up the way it was.

We came back to the apartment for a couple of hours around midday, in an attempt to regain the lost sleep from the morning and avoid the heat of the day. We also realised that we should change some more of our traveller's cheques, so decided to go to the bank, before continuing on the rest of our adventure, which we thought would only take a minute. We were wrong. We were in the bank for about an hour just waiting to be served according to some sort of strange cheese-counter style system. We did manage to use this time to see some sumo wrestling on the bank's TV though, which kinda made up for the ridiculous wait.

In the afternoon, we went back out on the subway to the Nishiki Market, where we saw lots of weird and wonderful things, including a bonito-making machine, some tiny pieces of sushi which appeared to have been handmade from silk and some giant tentacles!

We wandered out of the market as it closed down for the day and headed on up the street. On the way to our next stop, we managed to get massively distracted by a sweet shop selling all kinds of amazing sweets. Obviously we had to get a load to try, so we ended up leaving with a box of Pocky chocolate sticks, some tiny doughnuts, panda biscuits, seaweed jelly and a load of sweets just because they had pictures of Pokemon on them.

After this, we found our second accidental temple of the day- Yasaka-Jinja. This temple was also very interesting, and we saw someone playing traditional Japanese music. We started slowly heading back in the direction of the station, keeping our eyes peeled for Geishas as we went, although we didn't actually manage to see any.

We braved another department store (ever on the lookout for anything that could possibly be pickled fruit), and bought some rather delicious looking cakes, which are waiting in our fridge to be eaten after we've finished writing this!

Finally, we came back to Kyoto station and went to a Japanese cafe for dinner, where Helen had a rather suspicious-looking curry with an inexplicable egg on top and Sarah had "Japanese flavour" spaghetti, which was essentially spaghetti with mushrooms and fishy bonito. Despite the rather scary sounding descriptions, they were both very tasty, and a good way to end the day.

Tomorrow, we're off to the Pokemon Centre and for some Kobe beef.