Today I walked around Gion in Kyoto with Dr. To and the study tour group. Gion is actually where my hostel was! Although it is a city, it's very traditional, with lantern lined streets, Japanese style roves and architecture.
Gion is known for it's Geisha, so what better way to learn about Gion than from a Geisha herself. She was not in dress for this, but was very sweet and took us on small streets, told us about Geisha and took us to a few temples.
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| Geisha Hairpieces |
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| Street in Gion |
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| Beautiful Lanterns |
After that we visited
Sanjusangen-do temple which had a beautiful garden outside. I could spend hours just sitting in these gardens, in the shade, relaxing. Well, except for the screaming school tour groups that like to talk in English to us foreigners. Inside held an amazing amount of statues. It has 1001 statues of the goddess of Mercy (Kannon) painted in beautiful gold. They have 1000 arms to better help with human suffering and 11 heads to help understand the suffering. The statues have 42 arms actually, minus the 2 normal ones, times the 25 planes of existence and you get 1000! (You could not take pictures of the statues and I am not legally able to post pictures of them on my blog. But trust me, it was stunning.)
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| Beautiful Garden |
We then ended the day by going to Kiyomizudera. This is my second time (not my last either). This time I went with the group though and enjoyed just walking around and enjoying it rather than rushing to take pictures everywhere. Here are a few though:
1 comment:
I love old style towns like this! All the places I would like to go and see
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