A day in Kyoto

Friday, 26 Oct 2007 | Journal

During our preparations, Natalie sent me the address for the Shinkoin temple in Kyoto, which offered guestrooms for travellers. Sounded pretty amazing and so yesterday we hopped on the Shinkansen for a 3 hour train ride to Kyoto and soon after arrived at the temple in one of the Kyoto suburbs. We took the Hikari service, which means ‘light’ and is one of the slower services, but it still cruises at about 220km per hour. Check out this video (MPEG-4; 1,65MB) to get a sense of the speed! Thanks to Natalie for shooting the video, I never thought of that!!

Kyoto is a very traditional city and the old Japanese lifestyle is still to be found here, long gone from the streets of for example Tokyo I presume. Funnily enough, it is also known for its technology industry - a lot of small tech companies work out of Kyoto for whatever reason. Natalie and I, after dropping our bags, spent the evening wandering around the suburbs and after the downtown area. Funny was that in the suburbs we really did get the feeling people did not get to see foreigners a whole lot, but downtown I spotted so many tourists that it seemed odd that these places were in the same city. Kyoto is a very quiet town, both in the suburbs as well as the city center.

We wandered into a random eatery. The menu was only in Japanese but it looked quite nice inside, so why not go there. After we sat down, we got an English language menu and while I really wanted to eat sushi we ended up in a restaurant that specializes in ox tongue dishes. Gulp. Ok, well, be brave and order something. And so we did. The dinner was actually quite okay (it tastes like roast beef) and we enjoyed our little adventure. Maybe I should try eating the intestines sold on the streets of Bangkok? Nah, not quite ready for that yet. The waitress who spoke very little English was very cute in the way she communicated with us and tried to please us.

The Shinkoin temple turned out to be a family temple, one of many that had all been clustered around a main temple. It was a bit of a disappointment in the sense that it made for a different type of experience. More or less a traditional Japanese house in my eyes, a temple I expected was one with monks scurrying around and things like that. I took it for what it was to me, relaxing time after having run around for a week and really enjoyed the time we spent there. After having slept late in the morning, Natalie was taking a Zen meditation class (I was meditating in my own way!), and the weather not looking very good I decided to stay at the temple and spend the day relaxing. Natalie was planning to do a walking tour, but when the rain started coming down she also decided to stay in for the afternoon. We read, slept and chatted and after the rain stopped took a stroll around the area. We then decided to head back to Tokyo together. Initially I was planning to stay in Kyoto a second night but the trip from Kyoto to the airport would be too long and basically take up the whole Saturday already. So I figured I might as well go back to Tokyo today.

Looking back now, the whole trip to Kyoto cost 2 days and we did not really get to see or do a whole lot. But it was interesting to see another city and a really nice and relaxing experience to stay in the temple. Some true down time in a holiday that otherwise was a lot of running around. And for that alone, it was worth it for me.