Tuesday, May 19, 2009

5/18 Lost in the Land of Torii

Today we went to 10,000 Torii. Torii means gate and at this place there are 10,000 gates that you walk through along a path up a mountain. This was built in dedication to the Rice and Sake gods which are often represented by a fox. Torii indicate that the ground beyond them is sacred. Apparently if you climb to the top and pass through all the torii it will bring you good luck in business endeavors so we saw several businessmen making the hike. Our goal was to get all the way to the top. The sight was beautiful and the torii are bright orange and all of them have beautifully carved Japanese characters on them. We kept going and going, up and up through tunnels of torii. We finally reached the top after about 45 minutes, which was pretty anticlimactic....There was no amazing view or big shrine or anything, it just started going back down.

After about 20 minutes of going down, we came to a fork in the road. One way headed up and another one down, so we naturally chose the one going down. Well, another 20 minutes later and we could clearly see we were lost. Somehow we broke off the path. We ended up going through a bamboo forest and into a Japanese suburb area. We had to ask for directions 5 times to get to the closest train station. 3 hours after we started our journey we ended up at a train station on the other side of the mountain about 2 miles from the train station we got off at! It was an adventure and a lot of walking, but it was fun!

At night we went to Kyoto station, where we have been many times before, but we explored the entire thing. The station is enormous with 11 or 12 floors. We went all the way up to the top, taking about 5 escalators. At the top there is a garden and a great view of the city and just a big open area to hang out. This apparently is THE PLACE for couples and go on dates! There were couples all over the place. After that we got some dinner and called it a night.

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