DAY 5 (KYOTO) August 7, 2024 (repost from KCR/ER1 Japan Tour 2024)

It’s day 5 of our trip and we made it to Kyoto! Our breakfast this morning was different from the last hotel. The same buffet style as the last hotel, but many more choices. The food required you to make it yourself, and gave more room for customization. We had a guide today, whose name was Nobu. Instead of a train, we took our first public bus. It was unfortunately just as crowded. The bus dropped us off at the bottom of a shopping street with a temple at the top. We passed many shops on the way up the very long hill, and arrived at the temple stairs. At this point many of us were very tired, but we trekked on. There was an area of the temple were you had to take off your shoes to walk on the floor, and see the artifacts of the temple. It was very expansive and had many ups and downs. The view from the balconies were great. At the bottom of a flight of stairs were 3 waterfalls representing love, success, and longevity. If you washed your hands with one, that wish would become true.

After around an hour of exploring, we went back down the street to go shopping. Once everyone had finished we headed down to a tofu restaurant we had a reservation for at 1:00. Because of its size and layout we were in different rooms because there were 34 of us. We decided to go with cold tofu because it was about 96 degrees and felt like about 98 degrees. Luckily it was air conditioned.

Then we got onto a subway train and went to Nijō Castle. When we got there to the main building we had to take our shoes off to enter. Then when we got inside we got to see the rooms with replicas of the original artwork of the building. There are no photos of the art because taking photos and videos was not allowed.

Then we went back on a subway train bound for Kyoto station. When we got there we learned about the station and then we split up into different groups and went different paths to do different things, like eating dinner, around the station. And right outside was Kyoto tower, Kyoto’s tallest building.

Sam & Crawford