{"id":49,"date":"1996-03-27T10:46:53","date_gmt":"1996-03-27T18:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.senkou.com\/?p=49"},"modified":"2020-08-14T17:02:26","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T00:02:26","slug":"kyoto-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/1996\/03\/27\/kyoto-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Kyoto"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
View from Kyoto Tower<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Started off today by heading to the Imperial Palace Housing Office to get the permission slip to visit the imperial household. A longish trek that took around 2 hours to complete. Afterwards, I headed once again for the travel information center, who helped me make a reservation at a “Welcome Inn” for my last two nights in Tokyo before my flight. I needed a base of operations to do my sightseeing (shopping) from, and this seemed to fit the bill. Only around 5,100 yen\/night (reasonable).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Went to Kyoto Tower, and paid entirely too much to ride to the top and have a look around. I really wasn\u2019t terribly impressed with Kyoto Tower, it felt kind of like a cheap tourist attraction (which it was). Since the tower was only a few minutes walk from the Higashi Honganji temple, I headed over. Pretty similar to the Nishi Honganji temple, except that it\u2019s located on the east side of the city. (nishi and higashi mean “west” and “east” incidentally).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to the Imperial Palace for the tour, which was quite short, and a bit of a letdown. Couldn\u2019t enter any of the palace buildings, just walk around in the (very nice) garden outside. I really expected more for all of the trouble you had to go to (passports, rubber-stamping, forms, signatures and such), in order to get a pass to get in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Kinkakuji Temple<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Feeling a little “shafted”, I headed for the “Kinkakuji Temple”, which was a building owned by a Samurai, who had covered the building in gold-leaf. I quite enjoyed this temple, very tranquil, and pretty. I picked up a souvenir here for Erin (some nice incense), and a Japanese brush set for me to use for practicing writing in the Japanese languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the way back to the hostel, I had a little bit of bus confusion (actually, my plan was sound), however an overly helpful gas station attendant pointed me entirely in the wrong direction, resulted in two things when I took his advice:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  • I didn\u2019t find the bus I wanted.<\/li>
  • I did find a store which had the entire set of City Hunter Manga (comics) in stock. For 7,700 yen, I purchased the whole set. This works out to around $110. The normal cost in Canada would be over $300.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    Since buying this manga set was one of my “vacation goals”, I have to assume that some sort of fate moved this gas attendant to point me in the wrong direction. I couldn\u2019t have been happier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I figured that the easiest way to handle the (quite heavy) comics was to throw them in a box, and ship them to my pal Mujib back home. I didn\u2019t have a box though, and because my train was leaving quite early the next day, I had to scramble a bit to get organized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Started off today by heading to the Imperial Palace Housing Office to get the permission slip to visit the imperial household. A longish trek that took around 2 hours to complete. Afterwards, I headed once again for the travel information center, who helped me make a reservation at a “Welcome Inn” for my last two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}