My Kyoto experience was day trips from Osaka… Kyoto is a facinating city -on the surfase, just as uninteresting as Osaka – but when you found the special places and areas, you found the histrical Japan… Shrines, temples, castles etc.
I visited the Golden Pavilion – a beautiful pavilion set in a traditional Japanese garden, the Gion district known for the Geishas – am not sure I saw any, but the area now hosts lots of upmarket eateries/restaurants with the same problem as everywhere in Japan: Everything is in japanese, and foreigners are not especially welcome. And when all you see is a shut door with some japanese signs, it just doesnt invite to enter, does it?
That reminds me: I see very few gajin – foreigners – here in Japan. Maybee because there are so many japanese, but strikingly few…
The castle, residence of a shogun, was very interesting… A special detail was a floor made so that it would squirk when somebody walked on it – a so called nightingale floor, to protect from people listening in, and so that assasins couldn’t sneak up on the master. Interesting how they were thinking 500 years ago…
