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2016-07-16 01:01
in Japan, Japan2016, Ntrips, Trips
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After our few days in Tokyo, we headed towards Kyoto for their Festival Gion Matsuri. We arrived in the mid morning via a very packed Nozomi bullet train (people were standing in the aisles for a 2.5h train ride), and after checking in our hotel, we went towards Eastern Kyoto to do a hike in the hills and end up in Kiyomizu Dera (I figured that the main attractions would be packed with people):
sucks to ride a bullet train like this
Kodai-ji
fresh water cray fish
after our hike, we arrived at Shoren-in's Seiryu-den with a nice view of Kyoto
and we arrived at Kiyomizu Dera
On the way back to our bike, we managed to get in Kodai-ji just before it closed:
with a view of Ryozen Kannon next door which had already closed
we were lucky enough to see our first real geishas in the wild :)
Last, but not least, for the first night of Gion Matsuri: Yoiyama which is the viewing of floats in the streets. I figured it would be viewing of floats with a bunch of street vendors and that it'd be all nice and good. In real life, it was an insane sea of people, it was super hard to get anywhere, streets were randomly closed even to pedestrians by making them pseudo randomly one-way.
The amount of crowds made this less fun than it could have been, and Jennifer really did not like the huge crowds:
it got bad
then I went to bike back to our room (Jennifer had left earlier)
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