Kyoto

Kyoto was a lovely city, I really enjoyed it! We arrived in the early afternoon after travelling from Koya-san back to Osaka and then by the Shinkansen bullettrain from Osaka. The trainride took only 12 minutes, and we travelled almost 50 km! First stop was the Fushimi Inari shrine, which was a big area with different shrines spread out and sort of tunnels running inbetween them in the forest. The tunnels were made of wooden pillars painted a bright orange with inscriptions on one side.

After wandering around here for a while we took the train and underground to our hostel near Gion and the city centre. We checked in and freshened up a bit before going out for a walk to Gion, the geisha-area in Kyoto. There were lots of nice old houses and quiet streets, and it wasn't hard to imagine how it was in the old times, as this is the setting from the book Memoirs of a Geisha. We were lucky to see a couple of geishas aswell!

In the evening we went out for dinner at a very small local restaurant where I shared some traditional barbeque food with the Finnish guys. After dinner it was time for a little surprise, we were to learn how to perform a traditional tea ceremony! We were seated around a big table with our own teapot, cup, teapowder, wisk and napkin. After the Japanese woman and man at the end had demonstrated we had a go. It was very difficult, as there were so many rules about holding the cup, what hand you had to use, where to put the wisk after it was used in a very specific way etc. But it was fun! The green tea didn't taste too good though...

The next day was our big sightseeing-day. We started off with Nijo castle, home of the Tokugawa Shoguns. It had very nice traditional sliding doors, but the floor was really cold! The gardens were beautiful and we had a lovely walk through them. Then we carried on to the Kinkakuji shrine, a huge shrine set by a little lake and it was layered with gold all over. And I mean all over! Quite impressive. And quite an impressive amount of tourists there aswell. Last but not least of our attractions of the day was the Imperial Palace. We were very lucky to be able to se it, as it's only open to the public 10 days a year. We weren't able to go inside any parts of it, but the style of the buildings allowed for viewing inside through big open doors.

Then we had some free time which was spent shopping and curling up under our duvet with a movie and a bottle of wine (at least for Astrid and me), before heading out for dinner. And what a dinner! We went to an awesome sushi-restaurant which had the sushi coming past on an assembly line! Then you just pick the plates you want as they go past. You could also order pieces from a screen by the table, and then they arrived on a miniature Shinkansen-train which stopped right in front of your table. Very fun! Our table ate the most, with 34 plates. We were four people on our table and the plates had 2 pieces of sushi each, some of them 4, so that would be an average of about 20 pieces each. No need to say we were stuffed afterwards!
Then a couple of drinks and off to bed. A very nice end to a very nice stay in Kyoto.

Osaka and the mountains

We made it to Japan! But it was only just, because there was so much fog at the airport in Trondheim that the plane we were taking tried to land three times before it finally managed. So we were almost two hours late, and the flight to Amsterdam was supposed to take 2,5 hours and the onwards flight to Osaka was leaving at 17.25, so we were a bit stressed when we finally took off at ten to three. Luckily the winds were in our favour so the flight was only 1 hour and 50 minutes, but we still had to run like hell as we landed on the furthest runway and it took 10-15 minutes before we we out of the plane. Amsterdam is quite a big airport, and we landed at one end and were leaving from the other, so we were all nice and sweaty by the time we met the others.

So, landed in Osaka, and Astrid and I obviously looked very suspicious because we were taken in for an inspection in another room where they went through all our luggage. So once again, we held up the group. Fun! We finally made it to Osaka city where we checked in at a really nice hotel. Went out exploring the city after a nice shower, and had some sushi before we hit a bar for a drink.

The next day was our secret day, and we were surprised when we heard we were going up in the mountains and living in a monastery! We took a train up to the mountains, the scenery was really nice, lush and green. The last bit we took a cablecar straight up the mountainside, then a bus to our monastery. We stayed in nice rooms with tatami-mats that we slept on. It was really cold up in the mountains so we were glad we brought some warm clothes! We went for a walk in a cemetery which was really nice, and looked at a couple of temples. In the evening we had a traditional meal served by the monks, all vegetarian, with deep fried vegetables, tofu, pickled something, and of course rice. I slept quite well, even though the bed was a bit hard, as it was basically a thin mat on the floor.

Then off to Kyoto! More about that later.