Kyoto Day 3

On our third day in Kyoto we headed out to the famous Fushima Inari shrine, this shrine includes ~1000 Tori gates and you could have seen a small part of it in the movie Memoirs of Geisha. Unlike Switzerland, Japan has many train companies running their own stations and train lines, the biggest is Japan Rail of which we have a pass for, but to get to the shrine we took a different rail system, a commuter system for Kyoto. We walked through the shrine, which was huge and stretched up the mountain. Gates and gates and gates and tons and tons of tourists.

They thinned out as we got higher up the mountain, and we only went halfway up!

The shrine is to? a fox, and the fox likes deep fried tofu, so there was part of the shrine where deep fried tofu was left.

There were fox statues all throughout the shrine, and for ~5CHF we had a wood fox face that you would write a wish on and hang on the shrine, and I guess at a special temple day they would burn the offerings.

After the gates we went back into Gion and tried to find the Takoyaki place (octopus balls). I missed making Takoyaki in Vancouver, however the place was closed but we were directed to another great restaurant. We sat at low tables which had a large hotplate set in the table (actually, most of the table was hotplate). Again Sachi ordered and we had Yakisoba (noodle dish which was so good we ordered a second) and a second dish of pancake with noodles and egg and different variations of filling on top. Very tasty.

To finish our large lunch we had flavoured ice for dessert, this is apparently the thing to have, especially during summer festivals (and was also shown in the movie Memoirs of a Geisha). We got a giant pile of ice shavings with syrup flavour and cream drizzled over it.

Once again we were so full after lunch that we didn't really eat anything for dinner. After lunch we walked around the shopping areas of Kyoto, first in the older Gion area, and then to the more modern and less touristy section next door. Oh my was there a tremendous amount of shopping, it easily dwarfed anything in Switzerland, and Canada too for that matter. I believe lots of people come from all the neighbouring areas to shop in Kyoto on the weekend. They had huge long covered arcades just for foot traffic and full of shops, there were lots of Kimonos being sold (the cheap ones for ~30CHF that we saw many girls wearing around Kyoto) and young people calling out in front of the shops about the deals inside. In contrast to Canada (and even Switzerland I believe), Japan still has the department store culture and we visited a rather upscale one that even had a Kimono section. The real Kimonos cost start at 10,000CHF/CAD and we saw one at ~37,000 CHF/CAD (and we didn't go inside the section to have a look around). Sachi left to return to her home town, and we went back to the hotel for an early night of packing and sleeping.