City of thousand temples

And here we finally are, in Kyoto, the tourist Mecca of Japan... We were really anxious about coming so as soon as we managed to find our hostel, we just left our backpacks there and went to explore the city right away.

Kyoto is bigger than anything we've seen so far, with the exception of Tokyo of course but there we could move around the city easily with our rail passes and also Tokyo does not have even a half of the sights that Kyoto has. We started with visiting the Shinto Fushimi Inari Shrine, famous for its thousands of red torii gates that curl uphill to the top of Mount Inari.

Counting the torii at Fushimi Inari Shrine

From there we decided to walk up to the Higashiyama district, D promised it would not be long (according to the map...) but in the end it took almost an hour to get there. This is what we do here in Japan anyway, walk a lot around town, taking the backstreets that might not be super pretty but we get to see how people actually live here plus there are usually no crowds. Because Kyoto is all about crowds. How naive were we when thought Nikko was crowded! Japanese like their country and they travel around it A LOT. And they never travel alone, they come in huge groups. Every now and then we wished we knew some martial art to help us clear our way, but still it was absolutely charming and worth the time to stroll by the old wooden houses and small shops that look like they have been there since the beginnings of time (and sometimes so do their owners).

Ninenzaka stairs in Higashiyama

Besides crowds, Kyoto is full of temples. Chionin, Kiyomizudera, Kodaiji, I don't think we'll remember any of these names in two weeks time and we will probably get sick of seeing temples even before then but as of now, we try to see as many as we can.

The entrance to Chionin Temple

We finished our loop in Gion, the old geisha district, and were surprised to find out that it's not only the foreign tourist that go berserk when they see a geisha or someone dressed like one, Japanese go wild too. So when one appeared out of nowhere, the cameras wouldn't stop clicking.

Posing for the cameras

We had many plans for Sunday but the weather decided otherwise and pouring rain made us stay in the hostel the whole day. We wrote a bit for the blog, washed our clothes (much needed), watched episodes of Dexter and generally did nothing. But at least for dinner we tried a new dish - okonomiyaki - a sort of a pancake with shredded cabbage, meat, octopus, onion and other ingredients we didn't manage to define. There were slices of something on top that wouldn't stop moving. Creepy but we ate it anyway.

It actually looks much weirder than it tastes

Lets hope the skies will clear up tomorrow!