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| In the Bamboo Forest, toward the end of the day (larger image). |
Wednesday, 28 May: our
second day in
Kyōto ( part I )
As was the case yesterday, I took
so many pictures that it makes best sense to divide the
presentation in two. My journal for the day
starts,
«Breakfast at 8:10, there was an
Australian couple already there. Mason chatted them up a lot,
but Mark and I kept our heads in our food, of which there was
a lot.»
Our first objective was a big and old temple, the Sanjūsangen-dō, Temple of One Thousand Kannon. Indeed, in addition to a very large statue of the Bodhisattva, there were a huge number of smaller ones, in a very long, relatively narrow building in which the wood was extremely dark. But the literature said that it had originally been painted in bright colors. No pictures of the images, officials claimed that they would confiscate any camera caught in the blasphemous act. Over to the right I have a snap of one end of the temple, and down below a very amusing iPhone panorama of the whole thing, taken from a position standing right in front of it. (Don’t ever do that ! )
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Panorama courtesy of iPhone, showing the whole front of the
Sanjūsangen-dō. There’s also a larger
version. You see that the iPhone has teleported to another universe several of the people in the picture, but alas only partially. |
As Mark says on his page, the temple was overrun with school children. We had been seeing them everywhere before this, but here it was a bit more like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. We couldn’t stop to admire the statues, the children like salmon presenting a constant force for moving forward.
But please don’t get the impression that the kids were anything but polite. Once again we were stopped by some children who asked us to let them practice their Engrish. (No, once again, their pronunciation was good, Engrish is for the grownups.)
Quoting again from my
journal,
«From there
to the National Museum, but on this day only the special collections
could be viewed, so we decided to skip.
«Back onto the bus, very crowded, walk up a big hill to The Next Temple, and we definitely got nice views of the city and the hilly surroundings. Lots of pictures.»
By now, I was already templed out, and my journal doesn’t reveal the proper name of The Next Temple, but thanks to Mark’s really much more informative page, I learned that it was the Kiyomizu-dera. Because of its great elevation above the city, the views there were most interesting.
In the block of pictures to the right, the upper two were taken about a half-hour earlier than the lower ones, and I don’t know where we were at the earlier time. The lower two, however, are the approach to the Kiyomizu-dera and its gate.
Ever-fascinating ferns.
Walking on the temple grounds.
Walking down and away
from the temple.
The Kiyomizu-dera was obviously a magnet for Japanese tourists, not just the omnipresent schoolkids. Lots of people dressed to the nines, including young women in elegant kimono. We even saw a few young men in their much staider kimono.
It was so high up there that we got lots of good views of the city and the surrounding countryside. So I plugged in the long-focus lens that I had with me, and tried to take some interesting pictures. I was fascinated by the vermilion pagoda far away, apparently surrounded by forest, and not only took the picture that you see to the left (big image, small), but made a sequence of snapshots, to be turned into a stop-frame movie, which you see farther down. Below that, crowds descending a stairway (big image, small), giving an idea of how busy an attraction this temple was.
For the column of pictures on the right, at top, I think that like me, Mark is fascinated by ferns, and their variety (big image, small). Middle and bottom, pictures taken toward the end of our visit to the temple (middle: big image, small; bottom: big image, small).
| Ten-second clip of students at the temple |
| Stop-frame movie taken from high in the temple grounds (20 seconds) |
From there, we walked down the hill a way, and had lunch in a pleasant bright place, both Mark and me having curry with rice, finished off with soft ice cream.
Neither Mark’s nor my journal is any help here, but my always unreliable memory tells me that after lunch, we went a little way up the hill again, turned left, and went towards yet another temple, a Buddhist shrine, which you see from a distance as if caught in a web of wires in the left picture of the two to the right; and a less self-contradictory shot in the right image. From the pictures (including the movie clip below) I guess that this building is relatively old. But my eye may have been fooled.
| Nineteen-second clip of the multistory shrine. |
Many pictures so far, many more still to go. But there’s no specially good point to break them up, so I’ll stop here, just saying that the next attraction is a little narrow street supposedly the most beautiful in all Japan. See it on the next page.