Kyoto 京都市 - Japan

Whether it is visiting the world-renowned Fushimi Inari Shrine, Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, Golden Pavilion or just one of the many other palaces and shrines in Kyoto, one thing's for sure - it's hard to beat this city when it comes to sights and historical places. No wonder it's often called the City of Ten Thousand Shrines! You can visit, visit and visit some more, and still feel like you're only scratching the surface of the shrine supply. 

Kyoto, being also our starting point in Japan, makes a wonderful place to start exploring this fascinating country. As an ancient imperial capital, you can immediately sense the history when you walk down the alleys of its old town. It took about a minute to fall in love with it, no joke. After months of criss-crossing Southeast Asia, Japan felt like a small victory. A victory that's neat, elegant and graceful. I can't put a finger on it, but it's something about its people and the way they carry themselves that put us on a new level of a culture shock - in a very different way. When you hear people go on about how Japanese are polite, well, believe it. Whereas they are polite, kind, private and humble, they're also some of the most traditional and patriotic (in a good sense, mostly) people we've met. So, these were some of the first impressions but probably the main impression was being lost in translation at least half of the time, literally. We're usually pretty good with metros and subways (after all we're pretty well trained with the Parisian metro) but honestly, on our first day, getting from A to B seemed like a mission impossible. To this day I still don't get how we were so lost in Kyoto's underground... Seriously, you'd think that would maybe happen in Tokyo (which by the way was then already much easier) but in Kyoto? On the bright side, slowly but surely we came to notice that practise does make perfect (figuratively at least) - even in figuring out the Japanese underground system. Oh, and that's so not all when it comes to figuring things out; toilet functions, tea kettles (or any other instructions for that matter), food menus...you name it. There was always something new to figure out. And most of the time that something was involving high tech, which made it even more interesting...

Unless you know the sign language, you may feel a bit lost at first. But again, you quickly pick up a sign or two and before you know it, you're yelling a loud "Arigatou" when exiting a store or a restaurant. In fact, by the time we got to Tokyo, we were loving the guessing game so much already that we didn't even want to go places with English menu! Japan's just one of those few places where it goes to show that the probability of being understood in English isn't a no-brainer. And that's that. 

Another thing you certainly come across on the streets of Kyoto are the girls dressed up in their traditional kimonos. They could either be "maikos" (a young apprentice geisha) or you could even bump into real geishas, but often the girls are just dressed up for other purposes. In fact, you can see tons of these girls having their pictures taken in front of any monument of historic meaning. I don't know the story behind it, but for us it was really fun seeing so many people dressed up in their traditional outfits. The alternative was pretty much either that or seeing a thousand young school kids in their uniforms. Seriously, if we didn't know better, we'd think all the monuments in Japan come with school kids. In the end of the day, we weren't sure what was more impressive - the amount of kids or the amount of temples we saw!

No horse-carriages in Kyoto - just Gutsy men doing the job.

We found a beer garden!

Impressive precision and sign language (?!) on platforms and trains.

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