Travels with hannah IV

My Reunion with Kyoto

When I first visited Kyoto last March, I wrote of it as being an old love, a place with which I felt a relaxed and comfortable connection. Still, as I afforded at the time, we were visiting Kyoto at the height of its splendor, and that a great deal of my love for the city was because I considered it such a gorgeous place. January, surely, would show me a drastically different city.

Somehow, even in the midst of a barren backdrop, Kyoto maintained its beauty. Perhaps my eyes were blinded by familiarity (or, worse, general travel exhaustion), but on the whole I found the city to please me as it had last year. I still find myself unable to talk about Kyoto in specifics. For some reason, the city eludes my ability to discuss it properly to this day. Perhaps the third time will be the charm, and I will finally write a substantial post on it after my trip there with my parents in late March. The two of us had only a day there, so we hit three of what I considered to be the most important places (by which, of course, I mean my favorites): Kiyomizudera temple, Kinkakuji, and Fushimi Inari.

Kiyomizudera temple is beautiful, a description it earns from me due almost entirely due to two things: the trees surrounding it, which alternate between being laden with cherry blossoms in spring and shedding beautiful leaves in fall; and the materials of structure itself. The wooden buildings are a rich brown, but with a tinge of gray from the weather - it's warm, old, and comforting. In some areas of the complex, stone replaces wood, and the moss-encrusted stones give as much character and appeal to the structures as the gray of the tinged wood. It's truly a beautiful place.


Kinkakuji, the "Golden Pavilion," is gorgeous on first glance but is somewhat lacking in substance as far as I'm concerned. It is perfectly situated and striking, but the fact of the matter is that it was made to be a vacation spot for an emperor long ago, and is in fact a replica due to the fanatically-jealous acts of a monk in the '80s. It's a place to walk at, ooh and ahh, and then move on.

hannah and Kinkakuji - which is more super-special awesome? No contest; it's clearly hannah.

Fushimi Inari is first impressive and then soothing. The sheer number of red torii gates is enough to intimidate, but the feeling of walking past gate after gate, the seeming rhythm they make as they pass by ones peripheral vision, is wonderfully relaxing. It really is one of my favorite places in Japan.


We spent the evening relaxing in our hostel, the Hanakiya Inn - I recommend it to any of my readers should they ever find themselves in the area. And the next morning we were up early and on our way to our celebration of hannah's 24th birthday...