(This post is for Wednesday)

Kyoto is a city full of temples, shrines, shrines, shrines and temples. We saw quite a few, and barely scraped the surface! I wont bore you will all the details (because I could go on and on and on and on....), but I will tell you some of the highlights.

We started out the day at a shrine which houses a wooden Buddha thats about 1000 years old. Its really beautiful, but you cannot legally photograph it. They also had a lot of other smaller old statues of Buddhas and other guardians.

Then we went to a shrine with a famous zen garden. It was laid out in like the 1600s and they keep the format. Needless to say, Joey and I did not see the wisdom (though we didnt try really hard -- we do tend to mock things).
After that we went to the highlight of our day -- the golden pavillion. Its a pavillion where the top two floors are covered in gold. Its absolutely fantastic. Unfortuantely, you cannot go inside it or chisel the gold off, so all we took away were pictures. [Honestly, pictures do not do this place justice -- its an unbelievable experience to see]

Then we went to another zen garden. All we saw was gravel with two mounds in the middle of nowhere. We continued around to see some rocks and moss in the next few areas. Joey and I were both thinking "We paid 500 yen a person for this?" but then the monk came and explained it to us -- the whole garden signified lifes struggle and sometimes you hit a palce where you cannot go on (a dam) but really you can and although you really want to go back sometimes, life always goes on, until you reach the ocean of calm (hence why there was really nothing there). Anyway, way too deep for us :) But the monk did sing "Row, row, row your boat" to us while showing us the different parts of the garden! Totally worth every penny.

Next was the silver pavillion -- which never actually got covered in silver. They had beautiful gardens surrounding the pavillion. Then we went to Nanzenji, another temple, where you could actually climb the huge gate. The stairs are really narrow (made for asian feet) and it was really high, but well worth the climb because of the unbelievable views! You also have to remove your shoes, so you are climbing in your socks! Its odd.

The last shrine of the day was the Heian shrine, a garish, colourful newer shrine. It was the end of the day so everything was closing, but we did get a glimpse of the shrine inside and all of the exteriors of the building.

On to the last stop of the day -- Gion. We went Geisha hunting (for those of you who do not know what a Geisha is, watch Memiors of a Geisha -- but its basically an escort girl [or glorified prostitute]) At first we chased down any woman in a kimono (and got a couple of pictures -- the poor people!). But this is what we actually saw! She looked like she was 12-14 years old, but Geisha start young. She looked like a little kid playing dress-up, so who knows is she was real or not. But we'll say we saw a Geisha :)