Thursday 15 October 2009

Shrine gates and shrines overload

This morning we went out to Fushimi Inari to see the 10,000 gates. Before we went, we went on Google Earth to find where it was in relation to the train station, and then added it as a waypoint on the gps. We went to Fushimi Inari station on the JR Nara line from Kyoto Station. Like yesterday, we just missed the train there (except this time we wanted the local train, not the rapid), so we had to wait about 15 minutes for the next one to leave.

When we got there the way to the gates/temple was actually pretty obvious. In the temple bit near the bottom of the hill, there was a large group of school children looking round, and also a large group of Japanese business men looking round.

We walked up the hill through all the gates, which are all really close together. There are also loads of shrines all over the hill and people put replica wooden shrine gates on them. Also, there were lots of statues of dogs with stuff in their mouths and some of them were wearing bibs. We stopped partway up to eat breakfast, though by now it was about 12.30pm. There was an annoying cat that kept trying to eat our food though, so we just ate part of it, and then carried on.

We stopped a bit later to finish our breakfast, then went back down towards the station. We got the train to Tofuku-ji, and then looked around a temple there. It looked like some monks were giving guided tours, and one of them was old and skill and had a bear. Then we walked back to the Guest house.

I copied some of today's pics to the laptop, wrote most of this blog post, and went on the Luminous Landscape.

We went out again to try and find a shop with an ATM so we could get some more money out as the 10,000 yen we got out a couple of days ago was used up already! We walked around for quite a while, but it took us ages until we actually found a shop with an ATM. We also bought some chocolate biscuit stuff from there called Packitz and what we thought was 30 cups worth of instant cafe latte, but turned out to only be 6 cups worth.

We went back to the guesthouse, and I finished copying the memory cards to the laptop. I sorted the photos, then moved them across the external hard drives, which involves sitting very still holding the external hard drive power adapter in a certain position so it doesn't break (it seems a wire is broken inside the adapter wires somewhere or something, and it is very particular about how it is positioned or it won't work).

Food
Breakfast: Long sweet bread thing; Bread with melon flavoured cream stuff inside it; Pocky sticks; Bottle of amino value.
Lunch: A few bits of KFC style chicken; A KFC style chicken drumstick; some of Moccle's KFC style chicken; some of Moccle's cold rice; Bottle of Pepsi Nex.
Tea: Some cake stuff (like ginger cake but not gingery); Green tea.
Supper: Some Packitz; Green tea.

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