Japan Day 4: Kyoto some more

Day 4 was also spent in Kyoto. We had a little more time this day as we were taking an evening train back to Tokyo, so there are a lot of pictures in this post. Our first stop was a zen garden along the Philosophers Path (a walk of zen gardens, shrines and other iconic Japanese stops).

The rows above I understand... but I don't know how you get rocks to do this:

We made our way to a large shrine at the end of the path where they have a large gate and aquaducts! You could actually walk along the top of the aquaduct to where they control the water flow. Funnily enough, we could also basically see our hotel from the top of this.

We also made our way to the Nijo Castle, which is in the center of basically city and surrounded by two walls and moats. This is the outer wall and just behind it were several gardens and trees in blossom.

And this is the front of the palace itself. The walkways inside (and sometimes on the outside) of the palace were built so that the floorboards would "chirp" light nightingales. It would warn the guards and the emperor when ninjas or assassins were in the building.

After the palace, we went to "the golden pavilion" which is literally covered in golf leaf and weighs something ridiculous. It is surrounded by gardens as well and walks through the trees. We managed to give away one of our umbrellas here to a group of girls as it was pouring and the 6 of them only had 2 umbrellas (doesn't everyone in Japan carry an umbrella?). In return, they gave us some mochi snacks. =)

Andrew's goal the whole trip to Kyoto was to see a geisha, so we went back to the older district when they would be leaving for appointments. I think this was the most studying he did for any portion of the trip. ;) But we managed to see 3! And I snagged a photo...

We were on our way to a cultural show, which basically did 10 min short sequences of several different Japanese art forms, so you had an introduction to them all, rather than having to pick something. It was great for us as my parents and Andrew had never seen any of the cultural shows before. On our way in, we saw this crazy colored dog playing fetch.

At the show, we saw a tea ceremony, flower arranging (ikebana), instrument demo, traditional dance (pic1), part of a Noh play (pic 2), maiko or apprentice geisha (pic 3) and part of a bunraku play (pic 4). I've actually seen that whole bunraku play before, so it was interesting for me to see a part of it again since I knew the story.

After that, we went back to Tokyo to continue the rest of our adventure!