Saturday morning: Still sleepy, but really excited, I’m standing in Shinagawa station at the Shinkansen tracks and await the “Nozomi super express” train that will bring me to Kyoto. Upon my arrival in Kyoto, I locked away my luggage at the station and made my way for the Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion temple. Unfortunately, it was quite a rainy day – no wait… Actually fortunately! If the sun would have shone, I’d have died of the heat. Kyoto is located in some kind of natural frying pan – it’s surrounded by mountains on at least three sides, I think. Everyone warned me that going to Kyoto in the middle of August is some kind of attempted suicide 🙂 So I was not angry at the weather gods although it was raining. The temperature was convenient and I just bought a 500-Yen-umbrella (just about three Euro, folks)

Okay. Golden pavilion. It was… WOW! Seriously, this is quite impressive for the upper two stories of it are completely covered in pure gold and its location in the middle of the Rokuon-ji, a very beautiful deer park, is just magnificent. One of the guidance people standing around told me that the local government decided that there shall be no high buildings in Kyoto many years ago so the view inside the parks and temple areas is not spoiled by modern buildings in the background (like it always is in Tokyo).

After the golden pavilion, I went to the Ryoan-ji Zen temple with its famous stone garden. A very peaceful and calm place – pond included, of course. The stone garden features mostly empty space with just fifteen bigger boulders in it. Very interesting is one thing: No matter from what angle you are looking at the garden (which means from positions that a not too tall human being can have their heads in without taking a ladder or any other auxiliary material), you can only see a maximum of fourteen 🙂 I walked around in the garden for a while and finally departed for the Nijo-jo, an old defensive castle.

In the later afternoon, I felt pretty exhausted, went back to the station to get my stuff out of the coin locker and finally checked in at my hotel to have dinner and get some rest. After breakfast in the morning, I fell asleep again… 😀 Anyways, the Sanjusangen-do Buddhist temple was just next to my hotel, so I visited that one first. It’s really amazing for it features one huge statue of the thousand-armed Kannon accompanied by one thousand smaller statues (which still are of human-equal size) of the Kannon. Yes. One thousand. And because that’s not enough, there are also 28 big statues of famous guardian spirits. The name Sanjusangen-do literally translates as “33 spaces between the pillars”, referring to the architecture of the main hall. Phew. I was quite impressed by that one…

Because I still had some time left, I finally went to To-ji, what means nothing more but just “eastern temple”. However, this temple area is – just like the Kinkaku-ji – one of the major images everyone has in mind when thinking of Kyoto because it features the famous five-storied pagoda. Of course, there’s a pond here, too 😉 Come to think of it – Sanjusangen-do has no pond! Wow… Strange… 😀 Anyways, I took some stupid pictures here, too and enjoyed the sunny day. Actually, during my walk back to the Kyoto station (the To-ji is quite close to it) it became pretty hot and humid and I started to understand why everyone warned me of coming here in August.

Finally, I entered the station again, bought some O-miyage for my roomies and snacks for the train ride back to Tokyo and got on the train eventually and was a little bit sad that this very interesting and funny weekend had come to an end now. However, I took almost 550 pictures and here’s a selection of the good ones for you!

On Monday, Harald and me went to Kamakura to get a good spot on the beach for our cameras in order to get some nice pictures: Picasa-Album

Unfortunately, the battery of my cam was not really charged so it was lacking power quite quickly… But I had my small Pentax with me and this is actually capable of recording movies quite well.

I do not need to mention that we maybe had the very best spot in the whole area: right next to the ocean with no obstacles (or other people) in front of us, the launcher platforms perfectly aligned directly in front of us! 🙂

After this relatively small fireworks display (compared to Sumidagawa) we stayed at the beach for a while, ate our remaining crackers and waited for the first wave of people to clear the area. After some time we packed our stuff and made for the station. Unfortunately, the quite small train station was completely incapable of getting people into the trains fast enough and it was therefore kind of under siege by at least two thousand people. So Harald and me just decided to walk the approximate three kilometers to the next station, Kita-Kamakura. That apparently turned out to be quite a nice exercise because we had to climb up a nice hill 🙂 Good preparation for tomorrow…