JAPANLAND 2008: Kyoto!

I love Kyoto, I try and make it down whenever I am in Japan, there is just so much culture and history in Kyoto. We went to some amazing shrines and saw some real cool stuff. We started off at this shrine that has all it's pathways lined in Torri gates, it is soooo beautiful it's crazy. We ended up on these trails I don't think we were supposed to be one and hiked literally into the wilderness, like way off the beaten path. We found this cool little shrine/hut and continued to walk into the forest. There was some amazing bamboo forests as well, along with gigantic spiders.....After exploring around there for a couple hours we went back towards the station and decided to go to the top of the Kyoto tower (which is cool as fuck btw) you get a full 360 degree view of Kyoto and you can see everything. Lucky for us there were some very striking clouds/sun rays, which made for some awesome pics. After that I had to stop by my favorite shrine in Kyoto (this real small and really cool shrine) but it was closed! Really bummed, we had gotten there just as they were closing...So what did we do? Go get some asahi's out of a vending machine haha. We ended up just walking around and getting lost (literally) we took some turn and I got all mixed around (or so I thought) but we were actually going in the direction I thought. We happened to step under this parking garage and all of sudden it started raining cats and dogs, it was crazy but very very cool and relaxing. We basically sat underneath this garage for about 30 minutes just watching the rain and the people running from it haha. We made it back to the main strip to buy $4 umbrellas and get some food; it just so happens the largest matsuri in Japan was going on (a matsuri is a celebration). And the main street and side streets were closed off to cars and were just lined with street vendors selling food and goods. We got an amazing naan chicken curry sandwhich and walked around contemplating buying dung beetles so we could fight them in the hotel ha. After eating and just walking around for a couple of hours we headed back to the station to catch our bullet train back to Tokyo.

Bill and I literally took hundreds of photos here and I just can't post them all so please go to our flicker galleries and check them out!

Bill: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bildon/sets/72157606099853194/

Me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/39659820@N00/sets/72157606100975184/