Day 5: Kyoto

One of the deals that you can get being a travelor is a JR rail pass. With the JR rail pass, you basically get access to all JR trains, buses and ferries across Japan. Since I didn't want to stay in Tokyo the whole 2 weeks I was there. We decided to check out some of the shrines in Kyoto. Now the distance from Tokyo to Kyoto is about the same distance from San Diego to San Francisco. Now here's the cool thing, we took the Shinkansen to get to Kyoto. And the Shinkansen is the really fast bullet train, so we got from Tokyo to Kyoto in 2.5 Hours. Now while riding the train, we were able to see Mt. Fuji, unfortunately I wasn't able to take a picture because I was on the wrong side of the train.

Upon arriving to Kyoto, we first went to the Fushimi Inari Taisha. A little background on this shrine thanks to Lonely Planet, this shrine was dedicated to the gods of rice and sake by the Hata family in the 8th century. Upon arriving to the shrine, its a custom to wash your hands and drink the water at the entrance. I believe it was a form a cleansing before entering a place to pay respect. This place was pretty big, covering a whole mountain, so it was definitely a hike. But the view was just beautiful, the whole mountain felt like it had a lot of history in it. This was one of the biggest shrines they have in Japan, so it had a lot of graveyards and mini shrines honering the dead. You will notice along the walkways hundreds of wooden "torii." Now Torrii's is like a gateway, once you walk through one, its like cleansing your spirit before paying your respects. And with the amount of shrines they had in this one area, it was no surprise why they have so many.

Now we were suppose to go to another shrine that day, but we didn't know that most of the temples and shrines close at sundown. And we arrived in Kyoto 3 hours before sunset. Since we were only able to hit up one temple, we decided to hit up one more spot before we ventured back. And we definitely got the otaku out of us when we checked this place out. It was the Manga Museum in Kyoto.

Now the manga museum is exactly a Manga Otaku's dream. It has a collection of all the manga's ever made. And the best thing about it is, you can pull the books off the shelf and read them. Of course you have to know Japanese, but dayam all the manga at your fingertips. You can read anywhere in the museum, and there is a park area outside to read at if your that type of person. I admit man it was crazy holding the first volume of initial D in my hands. There was also some interactive area's where you can create your own characters and pretend to be voice actors. If that wasn't enough, the museum use to be a school back in the day. So we were walking in the halls of a Japanese school.

At this point, it was getting late, so we got a train back to Tokyo. Now thinking I would still be able to see Mt. Fuji, I asked for seats on the mountainside. Now I was on the right side, but it was already night and I couldn't see nothing because it was pitch black. We got back to Tokyo around 11:00 in the evening. And it was cool to see that the city was still running like people were just getting out of work. The funny thing is, that people were still getting out of work. So much to learn about this place, so little time.

Til next time.