Day 14 (Aug 12) - Ginkakuji and Gion

In the midst of Obon, trains are usually quite full. We opted to take the slower Kodama shinkansen, which makes stops at all the stations and increase travel time to 214 minutes from 151 minutes if we were to take the Hikari instead. We wanted seats, thus the decision to take the slower train since most people wouldn't want to go on it, and the fact that there were more unreserved seat cars for us to pick from. Fortunately, there were a lot of seats, meaning that we were able to get our own section.

A long trip, though it beats planes by a mile since I'm able to see cities and the countryside pass by. As we arrived at Kyoto, we disembarked and took a subway to go to our hotel. Since we were a couple hours early, we dropped off our bag and headed to find lunch.

After lunch, we headed off towards our first location: Ginkakuji or otherwise known as the Silver Pavilion. To travel to Ginkakuji, we took a train to Nazenji Temple, which was the start of the Philosopher's Path, which would lead to the Silver Pavilion. The walk was hot, with some shade. The path was quiet, with little tourists walking on it. After about 30-40 minutes, we arrived at our destination. The road to the pavilion had a few shops that sold food and other trinkets. Since we ventured to a wide variety of different structures throughout Japan, the pavilion didn't really stand out for me. We spent about 40 minutes before heading back to our hotel to check in.

After relaxing for a while, we headed out to find dinner before heading off to Gion. Along our walk, we found a ramen restaurant. As we were about to enter, a waitress asked us for how many people before asking us to wait outside as she prepared a table for us. Since it was quite hot that evening, she turned on the A/C. I misinterpreted her and I thought she said to smell the A/C, so we started to waft the air towards us until someone mentioned that I was wrong. And wrong I was!

The service was top notch and the ramen wasn't too bad! It may have been a Michelin restaurant as well since it had a Michelin guide book at the front, but I was unable to find the name of the restaurant on the internet. After dinner, we headed back towards Gion.

It took a while to head to Gion, but we finally found a section of the place. I didn't see any geisha or maiko walking outside, which was a bummer, but it was finally nice to see this district. We walked around for a while -- it was filled with tourists of all nationalities.

After a while, we headed back to a convenience store near our hotel to shop for breakfast. Perhaps not a lot of sight seeing today with all the travel, but a fair bit of walking.