Day 5 - Nijo, Kyoto 京都

Kyoto was much less dismal on the second day after the rain had stopped and our fuzzy heads cleared up. Our first stop after a spot of breakfast was Nijō Castle, across the road from the hotel.

The grounds of the castle were beautiful and there's also a walk around the interior of the castle but sadly you can take neither pictures nor your shoes. There were real nightingale floors in the castle, they squeak in a quite melodic manner when walked upon to warn of people sneaking about, stealing things from the fridge in the night and suchlike.

When we were done at Nijō we got the train up to Hanazono for a quick walk up the hill to Ryōan-ji zen temple. There's a quite nice rock garden there and some more beautiful gardens, much more manicured than even the ones at Nijō. Here's some pics and there are some vids on YouTube.

With our feet only slightly aching we figured they could probably stand a train ride down to Kyoto and a short walk to Tō-ji, a Buddhist Temple slightly south of Kyoto-eki. First though we wandered around the station a bit. We'd been through it before but I had never looked up and realised just how huge it is. Right at the top there's a walkway that terrified me while Dave walked on oblivious but it was still pretty awesome despite being ridiculously high. Here's a couple of pics from the station and city and again there's a vid or two on YouTube.

Finally, after a much longer walk (and blog post) than anticipated, we got to Tō-ji. Which was closed. However, Dave's photographer insticts won out and he still managed to get a decent pic of the pagoda from round the back across the road.

And that was it. All done bar the drinking, which we did back at the hole-in-the-wall bars next to the ones we went in the previous night. This time we were given some beans and scrambled egg to eat and some more beans to shell and eat. At least we could identify the food though and I wasn't wondering if either of us would be pounced on by the mother this time.