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Published: April 10th 2006
So, on the 3rd of April I turned a quarter of a century! It was a beautiful day in Kyoto that day. For my birthday Andy had booked a night at a japanese ryokan - which is a traditional japanese inn. It was a both a really nice and different experience. There is no permanent bed as such. There is a main room and a small sitting room. The main room has TV and for most of the day just a table and cushions. When it is dinner time they bring you about 4 courses up to your room and when you are finished, they pack up the table and make up your futon on the floor. At first it is pretty strange getting so much service, but quite nice.
The rest of the day we spent going to more temples. It was a really sunny day and we walked around the north western side of the city and went to 3 temples. The main one is called Rokuonji (the golden pavillion) and it is totally covered in gold, with a big gold phoenix sitting on the roof. A bit guady, but the way the gold reflected in the waters
of the pond in front of it gave really beautiful reflections - and the gardens around it were really nice too.
We also went and saw our favorite rock garden so far - which was in Ryoanji Temple. It was actually a lot smaller than what I'd imagined rock gardens to be. Suposedly it was laid down in the 13th century but a famous gardener and artist. Rock gardens are actually a lot more beautiful in their simplicity than what I expected them to be, and I think that they are one of the few types of gardens that we aren't sick of looking at yet!
I say that because the next day we went to the western side of the city and I think we were just a bit templed out by the end of that day. We went to Tenryu-ji temple and Zen garden. Don't get me wrong it was still a beautiful place, but again packed full of tourists and I think we were both getting a little footsore from all the walking we had been doing.
So, for something different we went to the Monkey Park that was close by. It turned out
to be not the most asthetically pleasing place as there are just so many monkeys who run riot on the hillside and get fed by tourists. I think they do a lot of damage to the trees as the environment looked a bit shabby were they lived.
The next day we decided to take it easy a little and slept in before heading out to another temple and garden in the afternoon in the far nothern outskirts of Kyoto. We went to the Sanzen-ji which turned out to be quite interesting. Andy had a go at writing some japanese characters which ink. And the garden was really beautiful. If think it would be even better in the summer as they had many rhodedenrums that were only just starting to sprout their leaves again after the snow.
From there we went on a short walk to see the waterfall nearby that was supposedly the inspiration for the buddist monks chanting. Sounds a lot like a waterfall...
On our last day in Kyoto we had planned to go to 3 more temples before we left for Osaka, but that didn't end up happening! Our first stop was the Nanzen-ji
which is a temple with what is called the "leaping tiger garden". It turned out to be a beautiful zen garden which you walked around on wooden balconies to look at. The balconies were on the outside of the temple buildings and inside they had beautiful screens depicting tigers in the jungle. I really enjoyed it but afterwards we both decided that we didn't really need to see any more temples.
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alice
non-member comment
YAY!
Happy Birthday Lol!