Kyoto - Day 1

It turns out that I can't upload videos that are more than 100 MB and the one I took of the Osaka Museum of Housing and Living is about 506 MB...so, I'm still trying to figure out a way to break it down. If you know a way, let me know.

So I'll just go ahead and proceed with our first day trip to Kyoto.

On the 10th we woke up really early, showered and went on our way to the train station. (For some reason all of the places we stayed at asked us to leave our keys at the front desk when we left the building.) We caught the loop-line to Osaka station and then we got on a local train from Osaka to Kyoto. Big mistake #1. I had called the Nishijin Textile Center a week beforehand to make reservations for us at 9:00 am. Since we caught the local train (the one that stops at every station along the way) we didn't get to Kyoto station until 9:00 am. Then we still had to get a bus pass and get on a bus.

If anybody wants to go to Kyoto, I highly recommend this bus pass. I got wind of it by mistake, and thank goodness I did, too. We saved SO much money with it. For 500 yen you can ride any of the flat-rate fare buses all day, with the bus pass, that is. It was quite nice. We would have payed about 5 times more if we hadn't gotten that bus pass.

Anyway, luck was with us and there was a number 9 bus waiting when we got there and it took off as soon as we got on. We didn't get to the Nishijin Textile Center until 9:35 am, unfortunately. But the ladies were really nice about it and they went ahead and took us to the room where they have all of the kimonos and gave us various garments and instructions.

My travel companion chose to wear a maiko kimono. For those of you who don't know, a maiko is a female entertainer. They don't actually call them geisha here, like we do in America, because a geisha is actually a male entertainer. The performers we know as geisha are actually called geiko here. I chose to wear a regular kimono, since I could wear it outside for the day.

Here are our pictures:



And after we'd gotten dressed and all of these pictures taken, we took the bus down south to Fushimi Inari Taisha. This is the shrine where they filmed Chiyo running through the tori gates in Memoirs of a Geisha. It's a shrine devoted to kitsune, or foxes. Foxes, here, are a symbol of a good harvest.



And we didn't have much time after I got changed out of the kimono, so we just walked around and had dinner in the Gion district. The temple shown below is right next door to Gion and maiko often perform dances at this shrine for festivals. The other pictures are of sunset in Gion and of Kyoto tower.


Hope you guys are enjoying these posts!