Blogs from Gion, Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan, Asia - page 5

Destination: Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture (Distance from Tokyo: 470km, approximately 294 miles) Map →　http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/location/regional/kyoto/index.html Date: November, 2009　 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kyoto is famous as a city of basin-shaped valley. It’s surrounded by the hills. Because of its confined environment, the city is hard to get fresh air from the outside over the hills. That makes Kyoto infamous for the sever weather. Very hot and sticky in the summer and f@#%ing freezing in the winter. So if you want to make your trip enjoyable there, spring or fall is preferable to visit. The size of Kyoto city is said 827.90km² and it formulates a rectangle shape with the long north - south vertical line and short east – west horizontal one. You can bike around the whole city except some steep hilly areas ... read more

Kyoto is also the capital of new and traditional culinary stuff. ... read more

Kyoto After rushing around for a couple of days in each place we decided to stay somewhere for a week. I also wanted to have my birthday in a main city. So Kyoto was our next destination. We stayed in a hotel near the station. The station was amazing. SO HUGE, very modern and grand, this is where I and James spent nearly every morning watching the world go buy with a coffee and a dunkin doughnut. HMMM….not a particularly a healthy breakfast but as it didn’t contain rice and fish we were happy. The station had everything in it…a garden on the top roof…100s of good restaurants, shops for everything it felt like a modern bull ring instead of a train station. This hostel was in a high rise building, we had another dorm and ... read more

We place ourselves on the bullet train and head back towards Tokyo to Kyoto. This city is also buzzing with people and full of energy, there are lots more tourists here as this is the place in Japan for temples, temples and more temples, we check out the area Gion, where we find ourselves face to white painted face with Geishas. They float through the area on huge wedged shoes looking incredibily delicate and surreal. We spend our time here looking around Gion at some of the temples and exploring the streets by the river which are very traditional in style. We visit a temple which is the largest wooden structure in the world, this is pretty impressive and even though we have seen many temples and shrines this one does stand out from the rest. ... read more

It was time for us to move on again. It is very tiring to constantly being on the move, never staying in the same hotel for more than 4 nights at most. On the other hand it does break up the time wonderfully - it makes it pass very quickly. We are never any where long enough to get bored. The plan, as of last night, was that HB and I would stay at the hotel in the morning, giving her some much needed downtime. But as I said yesterday, plans change and I am always the last to know. So why should today be any different. We all left the hotel at 10am, ready for another action packed day. Today we were off to the Golden Palace. Not much to say about it, except it ... read more