Nov. 6 -- Adventures in Kyoto, Continued...

We woke up in Osaka, packed our stuff, and hopped on the Shinkansen bound for Kyoto again. Upon our arrival, we decided to explore the Kyoto train station a bit...and realized just how *huge* the place really was! We took about 6 large escalators to get to the food court at the top of the station's attached department store (U.S. equivalent of a mall), where views from the top afforded us a bird's eye view of pretty much all of Kyoto. It was fantastic! The building itself was gorgeous! And, as you can see, they've already begun to prepare for Christmas...

What you think is the bottom there...is still about 4-5 stories up. Yeah...it's a tall building.


After lunch, we hopped a bus to Heian-jingu Shrine, a Shinto shrine build in 1895 to commemorate Japan's moving of the capital to Kyoto 1,100 years ago. It, like pretty much all of Japan's shrines, is a working shrine. As you can see in the pictures below, a *gigantic* torii marks the entrance to the shrine -- apparently, this is one of the biggest torii gates in all of Japan. Sweet!

A tree of wishes

A couple, strolling along in traditional kimono

After taking in our fill of the Heian-jingu Shrine, we strolled back towards Gion (again) to find the subway back, and to hopefully see a geisha (geiko in Japanese) or a geisha in training (maiko); we were succcessful with the subway, but not with the geisha =( The pictures here are from our walk back.

*gorgeous shot by Andrew*

How cool is that? We found an old-fashioned printing press machine in a print shop!

This is a public bathroom. Seriously.

Concluding our Kyoto visit, we hopped back on the Thomas the Train decorated subway (talk about random!) back to the Shinkansen, where we headed back to Tokyo.