Kyoto

Left our Hiroshima hotel at 7:45 and clattered down to the station, and are now speeding back to Osaka at (up to) 300 kph.  There we change for a 15 min last leg to Kyoto.  Shinkansen are great!

(later..) We are now in the Hotel Keihan Kyoto, beside the main Kyoto Railway Station Complex.  Today we have to park our bags in the lobby and spend the day out, before checking in later.

 A local train took us to the Fushimi Inari Shinto Shrine, notable for the more than 10,000 torii gates erected by financial supporters.  These form an almost solid archway along hundreds of metres of pathway climbing up the mountain.  There are also many fine fox statues (messengers for that particular god).  It was very hot and raining, and we were climbing up that mountain, and on that afternoon I was unable to raise the energy required to get out my camera to take pictures.  Fortunately the others were still clicking away.


After lunch we took a bus and walked to near the more traditional Gion district for "maiko", at a studio called Maica, where Lisa and others were made into Maikos (apprentice geishas) or samurai for a couple of hours.  That was a startlng transformation, and everyone enjoyed laughing at each other and posing for (or taking) photos.

Minji introduced us to the local sport of geisha-spotting.  There is area of little streets and traditional tea-houses where the real geishas work, and tourists go there and loiter on corners with their cameras ready, hoping to spot a real geisha.  Sure enough sooner or later one will suddenly emerge from a building, walk a short distance down the street (at speed) chased by photographers, and disappear again.  Minji told us these appearances are understood to be one of their duties as a geisha, to support local tourism!

We wandered up and down and old shopping street in the Gion district, then for dinner Minji took us to a "Japanese hot pot" restaurant.  We were all seated along a bar counter, with a gas cooker for every two people on which was placed a ceramic bowl of watery stock of some sort.  We took the meat and greens we had ordered and cooked them ourselves in this hot pot, making a sauce from the cooking liquid, a spicy paste, and the juice of a lime.  This was made in the bowl we ate the cooked food from.  Very tasty (but hot work!).