The plan for today was to hit quite a few different shrines, so we headed out early. The weather was kind of spotty. It was fairly cloudy and basically rained and sprinkled off and on throughout the whole day. Fortunately, this time, we were smart enough to borrow umbrellas from the hotel.
We took the subway to Hanazono station and headed off to see the shrines. Right across the street from Hanazono station was the first temple, named Hokongo-in Temple.
From there it was about a 10 minute walk to Koryuji Temple, which was VERY small.
Next it was off to Myoshinji Temple (another 10 or 15 minute walk). Myoshinji temple was more along the lines of what I thought a "temple" would look like. It really wasn't just one building, more of a large complex of buildings.
Inside Myoshinji Temple there is a subtemple named Taizo-in. Inside this sub-temple is a very pretty rock garden. Since it only cost a few hundred yen, we went to take a look.
After seeing the Taizo-in garden, we continued to wander around the rest of Myoshin-ji Temple. We came across a couple of interesting things.
In the picture on the left, you'll see a monk in prayer. I was just wandering around and saw him there. I didn't disturb him with the picture, but later we found out we weren't even supposed to be in that area of the temple. Whoops...
We also came across this one section of the temple that had these little monk statues. The were SO cute. You can see that some are sitting, and some are lying down.
After wandering around the Myoshin-ji Temple for about an hour or so, we next headed to Ninna-ji Temple.
As you can see from the pics, the entrance gate was pretty large. (top left pic). After you went thru that gate, you passed thru the second gate (top right pic), where the rest of the buildings were located.
This second smaller gate had two Nio (Deva King) statues that served as guardians. Also, the five-story pagoda could be seen as well.
And lastly, according to my guidebook on Japan, the dwarf sakura trees located in this temple complex (top left picture below) are some of the last sakura trees to bloom in Kyoto.
After Ninna-ji Temple, it was a short walk to our next temple Ryoan-ji Temple. Ryoan-ji temple is best known for its rock garden, which is supposed to be the ultimate expression of Zen Buddhism. But, the garden with the pond in it was also very pretty as well.
Here is what it looked like as we approached the main building:
Once we arrived at the main building, we went inside it and looked around. It is almost a mini-museum itself, but the biggest attraction here was the rock garden:
I attempted to take panoramic of both the rock garden and the pond garden, but unfortunately, only the pond garden one turned out very good. It was really pretty with the sakura trees and the pink sakura blossoms floating on the pond as well.
Next stop on our tour was the Kyoto museum for World Peace. This was a small museum that had a lot of interesting posters, and other artifacts from Japan during WWII.
The person working there asked us to write our opinion about the US war with Iraq as we were leaving. I'm not sure they'll like my opinion. Oh well -_^.
After the peace museum, it was off to one of Kyoto's more famous temples, Kinkakuji. Kinkakuji is best known for it's Golden Pavilion. I'd seen pictures of the golden pavilion before, but they don't come close to how neat it looks in person. Especially since it seems like it's floating out in the middle of the water.
Being such a popular tourist attraction, and due to the fact that it was a Saturday afternoon, Kinkakuji was VERY crowded with tourists. This is what we saw as we approached the temple grounds:
Until, finally, it opened up to the open area of the garden where the Golden Pavilion was located.
As you walked around the right hand shore of the pond on which the pavilion was located, you could get closer to it.
And finally, as you stared walking away from it, you came to the small area where you could buy souveniers and such (right pic, below).
And, finally, these are a couple of pictures I had taken with my ugly mug in front of it. They turned out pretty well, I think.
The golden pavilion for which it's famous for was definitely a sight to see. But the rest of the temple grounds were very pretty too. Even despite all the people, it had a very peaceful feel to it
Next was a quick stop at Imamiya Shrine. It was a smaller shrine, but had some pretty cool statues on the street leading up to it
as well as some at the front gate.
The inside of the shrine wasn't too shabby either. ^_^
And finally, the last shrine we hit today was which was more like several smaller shrines close together to make the bigger complex. The shrines in this small "complex" consisted of: Juko-in, Daitoku-ji, Daisen-in, Sangen-in, Korin-in, Zuiho-in, and Obai-in temples. Since we were just wandering aimlessly thru this complex, it's kind of hard to keep track of which pictures went with which shrine, so I'm gonna try my best.
Daisen-in
Juko-in
Daitoku-ji
Sangen-in
Korin-in
Finally we headed to Kyoto imperial palace via the Kamo River. (In other words we walked a little to far east and had to backtrack a bit. That's alright though, it was a nice view, minus the rain of course)
Although you couldn't go inside the palace proper (you can, but you have to jump thru a bunch of hoops to get permission to), the palace grounds were HUGE. There were a lot of sakura trees there that were still in bloom too.
One more thing I took a picture of was the palace itself (well, the wall of it). I must say, this panoramic turned out pretty cool.
