Woke up refreshed from a night sleeping on futons and went down to our traditional Japanese breakfast.

Cooked our own tofu – locally made and very good – and had other, more mysterious, Japanese breakfast foods.

After that we packed up, checked out and trundled off 5 mins down the road to our second (less traditional, less expensive) Kyoto hotel. We were too early to check in but, with the aid of google translate, we organised to leave our luggage there while we went exploring.

We decided to go and check out Arashiyama – an area on the far west edge of Kyoto, about a 30 minute train ride from the centre of the city.

We started out by walking over the Togetsu-kyo Bridge (above) and on to the main street of Arashiyama.

Miffy bakery:

It was a warm day so we grabbed an ice cream. I tried the cherry blossom flavour – in the spirit of the season – and it was… weird. Edible, but definitely strange.

Next up was Tenryu-ji (a zen temple with several buildings spread out over well-tended gardens). Another world cultural heritage site – we should have kept a running count of how many of those we’ve seen. Nice buildings (above) but absolutely lovely gardens. Hopefully my photos do them some justice. Thinking of Mum and Narmada when I took some of these (non-gardening people may want to skim):

From here we headed to the famous Arashiyama bamboo forest. In all the promotional pictures you see of it, there’s either one person walking the path alone or it’s completely deserted. In reality, of course – like everywhere else in Japan – it is rammed with people. However, it was still a lovely walk and if we concentrated we could hear the wind rustling the leaves far above us.

At this point we had some general flagging. Corwin has a decent cold and was getting very tired, and Maeve got a pain in her foot that we couldn’t find the source of. So, time to head back to the station and our hotel. Photos below of the “kimono forest” at the station:

And the weekend train we came back on:

We got back to the hotel mid-afternoon and the kids blobbed right away. I decided to go to the local Nishiki market and, as no one was game to come with me, I headed off on my own.

This photo (below) is of Nishiki but from earlier in the day. We’d decided to start there but changed our plans when we found many of the shops closed. Gives you an idea of what it looks like. Now add several thousand more people to the picture. That’s what it was like when I was walking through.

Walked around for about 3 hours. Mostly food stalls but I found some galleries and a Japanese paper shop, as well as some other cute wee stalls.

A couple of other beautiful Kyoto photos to round out the day:

Tomorrow we go to Hiroshima.