Day 1 in Kyoto

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We arrived in Japan at 11:30 AM and as “Premiere travelers” we made it off the plane and through immigration in a snap. Our “Premiere suitcases” also made it off the plan first and came on the carousel in a neat row with all the other suitcases of the same size. With our JR train passes we headed to the station for the 12:24 train to Kyoto that left at ??? you guessed it 12:24 after being thoroughly cleaned and having the seats turned round so they were facing in the correct direction. Just as we had expected our taxi to the hotel had white doilies and the driver wore white gloves. This is a no tipping world and it’s a pleasure not to have worry about who you should be tipping and how much. The hotel is great, quite frankly much nicer than I expected and the staff of young women is helpful and consistently apologetic . If you have to wait for the elevator, they apologize, if you have to “wait” while you walk to the reservation desk, they apologize. It only takes about ten minutes before you want to be equally polite. For me it reduces the stress of navigating daily tasks.

We decided to make your first visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine since it was highly recommended and off by itself. Getting there was our first experience using public transportation. There are subways, the JR train line and multiple private train routes. I’m going to include a photo of the route maps that you use to purchase tickets. We did great finding the correct line and a type of train, but our first 2 tries we road in the wrong direction and had to back-track. The 3rd time worked like a charm.

The shrine is the main shrine for 4,000 Inari shrines and is a complex of beautiful buildings on a hillside. More beautiful that the shrines are the pathways of torii, orange columns with inscribed prayers of thanks that line the pathways on the hillside. Initially the torii are 10’ tall and widely spaced, but further up the hill they are 6’ tall and very close together lending more of a tunnel-like feeling.

After that I dragged Jack to Gion Corner for what turned out to be a touristier than expected introduction to Japanese performing arts along with the tea ceremony and flower arranging which were pretty lame. Jack’ s Mom does better job or flower arranging. The part that was cool was Bunraku which is sort-of a puppet show with 3 people dressed in over-sized, hooded black outfits move an almost life size puppet around the stage. That was worth the price of admission since if we hadn’t seen it there we wouldn’t have seen it at all. By the time it was over we were more than ready for bed so we stopped for some quick noodles and took a taxi back to the hotel.

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Photos

Fushimi Inari Shrine
10,000 tori create corridors over an entire hillside

Bunraku in Kyoto
This is the ulitmate in puppetry. I wished we could have seen an entire performance

A dying art and lifestyle
Fewer & fewer women are choosing 5 years of training required to become a geisha and fewer and fewer Japanese men are will to pay upwards of $1,500 for 15 minutes

Comments

[Jessica]

jet setters
nice work, folks! i'm enjoying reading your blog, so keep at it. lots of love...