Waking up is difficult for some, and we get out of the hotel with no chance to take our Shinkansen for Kyoto. But the great thing with the JR pass is that you have unlimited travel for the week (or 2, or 3, depending on the length of the pass). In addition, most Shinkansen have 3 or 5 cars with unreserved sitting. So we just look for a replacement ride, and find that we can ride to Shin-Osaka 20 minutes later. Bonus: we will ride the famous Hello Kitty Shinkansen! And off we go. After 20 minutes, we arrive in Shin-Osaka, and have just the time to switch to another Shinkansen for Kyoto.
In Kyoto, it is hot. We place the suitcase and some bags in, you guessed it, a coin locker. And we explore the station mall to find the place to eat an Omuraisu, or omelette with rice. The meal is delicious, and we are ready to step out in the heat. We pass the Kyoto tower, and reach a big Buddhist temple that is really worth visiting: The Higahi Hongan-ji temple. It is huge, with several temples, a big bell. Inside the buildings, it is all tatami, so you have to walk with your shoes in bags, but they state that the bags are reused. In the main temple, we run into a ceremony, and train our knees on the tatami to take the experience. We go on visiting, there is a rope made of hair (stronger than what they could do 3 centuries ago, it seems) and a piece from a famous snow catastrophe dating back 3 centuries, too. Despite being completely open, it is much cooler in the buildings, although almost everything is cooler than “real feel 40C”.
Next we walk a block to the Shosei-en garden (also known as Kikoku-tei), which is affiliated to the temple. After a hydration stop near the bottle dispensers, we visit a nice, if a bit dry, garden. You can see it is unusually warm and dry here too. We come across a charming bridge, a pond with many herons, old wells. It is the time to go back to the station, fetch our stuff from the coin locker, and go to our tatami hotel.
The hotel is pleasant, we have a delightful tatami room with four futons. After getting our stuff organized for the next 4 days, we take a stroll along Shio avenue, which seems like one of the main shopping avenues in Kyoto. We reach the Geisha neighborhood, Gion, explore a bit, take a stroll on Hanamikoji street, and look for a sushi place. We are not welcome at one place, but accepted in another. We are alone in the restaurant, eat well, and interact a bit with the 2 sushi chefs and the two women that bring the dishes and the drinks. It is a nice experience, even though these are regular, not Kyoto famed, sushi.
To finish the day, we go and visit the famous Yasaka shrine. It is a good shrine to visit at night, as many businesses sponsor a lantern, and all lanterns are lit every night. It is quite a sight. We then walk through Kyoto by night, go buy stuff for breakfast, and go back to rest in the hotel.
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