After racing around so much over the previous week we decided to give ourselves a break and not try and do so much during our last few days in Kyoto. The weather forecast wasn't great, but with a window of sunshine predicted for the afternoon so we planned to visit Fushimi Inari Temple, and amble through the shops during the morning.
The temperatures were still cold; they've been only 3-5 degrees when we have ventured out, getting up to around 12 degrees but often with a thin breeze that was very chilling. We were pleased to have all our woollies with us again. So, we had a cruisy morning, with a few purchases. Finding a good coffee is proving to be very challenging, and I have to admit that on two occasions now we had to resort to Starbucks. Most cappuccinos have been warm espresso below and a great mound of white fluff on top. Only yesterday's enthusiast coffee cart has done a proper flat white.
We just picked up a few pastries to munch for lunch but struggled to find somewhere to sit down and eat them. The Japanese simply don't eat when walking, hence there are very few rubbish bins, and there are virtually no public seats in the shopping areas. We ended up perching on a small shelf outside a shopping plaza and definitely got a few odd looks while trying to surreptitiously eat our goodies.
A good find was a shop called Daishodo, in the covered shopping area. We'd been looking for an ukiyo-e woodblock print, preferably by an artist called Hiroshige, and of the Nakasendo Way or Tokaido. The shop had dozens of genuine woodblock prints, as against printed reproductions and we found exactly what we wanted.
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| Daishodo print shop |
With a decent walk to the train station, it wasn't until 3pm that we jumped on a train for the quick trip to Fushimi Inari Shrine. It being mid-afternoon we figured that there mightn't be too many other people visiting. Wrong. This and the Bamboo Grove walk have been was pretty much the only places we'd met lots of people at the same place as us.
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| Fushimi Inari Shrine, lots of tourists |
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| The start of the torii |
This shrine really is a tourist attraction, with every good reason. It's the principal Inari shrine in Japan and is characterised by literally hundreds of torii (gates) leading uphill towards and above the shrine.
We only spent an hour there in total, but it was a lot of fun walking through the gates, each of which was covered in Japanese writing. Thankfully most tourists are pretty lazy, and by the time we got higher up through the torii the crowds had thinned and we even managed to get some tourist-free shots of the superb vermillion gates.
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| Sake barrels at the shrine |
Getting back was just a reverse trip with our train pass, and a walk home. We managed to walk past our hotel's area by mistake, but found ourselves in another gorgeous old area full of very expensive and exclusive restaurants, all very discrete. You'd have to know them in order to want to go to them, as they have no advertising, menus or anything other than the standard lantern that shows they are restaurants.
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| I'll have one of those please |