Friday, August 2, 2013

In Which We Climb Up Even More Stairs And See Some Kickawesome Stuff (Also in Japan!)

So, I'm writing this post about our third day in Japan. It may have been my favorite day, though it didn't include my very favorite things we visited. Probably my favorite places we visited were the Shogun's palace (Nijo-jo) and the old Imperial Palace, just because I think that Japanese history is fascinating. Anyway, you're not reading this post to find out about that, though. You want to know what we did on our third day in Japan! As the title would suggest, it involved a large number of stairs.

We woke up and it was raining pretty hard, but we didn't let that slow us down. We headed out and got on a train and rode it down to the stop for a huge shrine called Fushimi-inari-taisha. When we got out we quickly bought another umbrella for Nancy at a souvenir store and then headed for the shrine. Remember how I said I would have much more to say about torii (shrine gates) in my post on this day? You probably don't but I did say it! Well, this shrine's talking point is that is has thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of those gates lined up one right after another all along a trail up the mountain. In some places it makes a tunnel effect of sorts, and it was pretty awesome. Here are some pictures:

Big gate for the main shrine. This shrine's big thing was foxes. Most of the statues of them were wearing some kind of apron. I'm not sure what was up with that, but I was cool with it.

Some big torii.


Smaller ones, but really close together. We hardly needed umbrellas in here!



Pretty pond/lake about halfway up the mountain.

Nancy at the bottom of some stairs. (There were a lot of stairs.)
Me at the bottom of a never-ending flight of stairs. (This was almost at the top.)


There were lots of mini-shrines all along the path.

It kind of looked like what people would do was write prayers on the mini torii and then put them on a shrine on the mountain.

Top of the mountain! I expected a view, but there wasn't one, just a shrine. It was cool, though, and it was a fun hike.

Nancy at the top.

On the way back down. Somewhere along the line I got soaked, and I'm pretty sure it was with sweat, not rain, at least mostly. Turns out that when it rains in the summer in Japan, it doesn't make it cooler. It stays just as hot and gets even more humid.

 So, that was pretty awesome, and it was fun to get to do something (hiking up the mountain) rather than just seeing things. Also, I was surprised to notice that I really didn't have any trouble on those stairs. It may have something to do with how the scale that we bought here says that I've lost about 15 pounds since we moved to Korea. Interesting. Maybe if I keep going at this rate I'll quit breaking so many bones when I go canyoneering.

At any rate, after Fushimi-inari-taisha, we went and got on a different train and then transferred to the subway and then walked about twenty minutes to a temple called Daigo-ji. We were being a bit more selective about what we wanted to see today, and this one was near the top of my list. I had seen pictures of it on postcards, and I wanted to see it in real life. For me, the real selling point of this temple is the huge five story pagoda. However, it really wasn't highlighted in our guidebook at all, and was just barely mentioned, really. I was worried it would be a dud, but it turned out that our guidebook was as wrong about this temple as it was about Ginkaku-ji (That's the underwhelming one.). This temple was awesome! The five story pagoda was super cool and they had some other really cool stuff on their grounds. We didn't even explore them extensively, but what we saw we really liked. We turned back partly because it was raining, and partly because, after you've seen a few Buddhist temples, they all start to kind of look the same, unless they have a distinguishing feature, like the pagoda. If they're just you're standard one-story affair, though, they really do all kind of look the same. Anyway, here are some pictures of Daigo-ji, which I thought was pretty dang cool.

Main gate of the temple. They had cool statues on either side of it, which is kind of unusual.

Five story pagoda! We hoped those people would get bored of it and move, but then we decided to just take the picture. Then they moved. But it was raining, so we didn't retake this one.



Masterfully handled self-timer shot, if I do say so myself.

Awesome bridge and small pagoda. Strangely enough, this is what was on the cover of our guidebook, but it was still hardly mentioned inside.




Sweet garden above the pond.


Another masterfully handled self-timer shot.
Coincidentally, Daigo-ji actually had very few stairs, at least in the part of the complex we explored. It's very possible that they have more of them around the buildings that are farther up the mountain.

After Daigo-ji, we headed back to our hotel (mostly so I could change out of my soaked shirt) and then went to lunch at an awesome noodle restaurant. Just so everyone knows, Japanese noodles have the Cliff Chandler Stamp of Approval. They are delicious. Here's some proof:

Seriously, though, these noodles were really good. I checked out how to make them on the Internets and I'm totally going to try it. What was also cool was that they had a fountain for their beef broth, and it was self-service, so you could get as much broth as you wanted. They also had all kinds of deep-fried food at this shop. I would totally have gone back, but Nancy said we had to try different things while we were in Japan.

After lunch we went and checked out the Nishiki Market. It seemed to have a lot of fish in it, mostly, but was a pretty cool traditional market. After that we just shopped around a bit and had a relaxing evening. But, overall it was an awesome day! That's all I have to say at the moment. This is Captain Danger out.

2 comments:

  1. Man! Those pictures look so beautiful. I so want to go there!

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  2. These are sweet Cliff, looks like a lot of fun.

    ReplyDelete