April 4

Matt and I were up earlier than Dan and Mohan as they stayed out much later than us. We got showered and headed out for a coffee. Found a little place that had good coffee but pricey. Wandered around a bit. It is supposed to rain today but right now, it is nice. Cloudy but warm. 

Headed back to our home away from home and all of us headed out for the day. Our first stop was breakfast. Very interesting place. A salad, half a piece of toast, a boiled egg and coffee. Of course, everything is a small serving. I think breakfast might be 250 calories. But we ate some coffee jelly with ice cream too. Pretty weird but fun to try.

Headed to our first temple, Kiyomizu-dera. It is interesting. Temples everywhere here and I mean everywhere. And then the gates that separate the divine from the secular, everywhere. We took pictures and marveled at the temple and then headed to our second temple, Nanzenji. We stopped at a very interesting bagel place and had bagels unlike bagels at home, that’s for sure. One was cheese and honey and the other was carmel with nuts. The funny thing was trying to cut them into quarters to share with a throwaway wood knife. It was a task. We wandered some more on our way to the temple, enjoying all the beautiful sights along the way. Decided to stop for lunch. Of course, we had to do the shoe thing. Take them off, put sandals on. Make sure the shoes don’t touch the wrong floor and the sandals don’t either. We’ve done this in a lot of places and it is pretty challenging sometimes. Our lunch was really good. It was the same type of serving that we had at our AirBnB in Hakone. Dan says this is called kaiseki. Tiny amounts of probably ten or so different things. After lunch, we continued on to the temple. Can I say, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all? Probably not. The grounds are different and they really are a marvel of architecture. This temple also had a remarkable aqueduct on the grounds that was built in the late 1800’s. 

By now, the rain is coming down and it is starting to be pretty hard. We walked to the next temple with umbrellas up. And Mohan wanted to make one more stop to eat. We had coffee and he had some local fried thing with octopus in the middle. It was ok. Not sure how much I liked it. 

The next temple, Ginkaku-ji, required an admission fee of 1000 yen. We’ve walked quite a way to get there so we paid and went in. The grounds for this one were absolutely beautiful. Even though it was pouring rain, it was so nice to be there. This temple was built in 1482. The samurai lived there until 1489 and then the temple was transferred to the Buddhists. Truly a remarkable piece of history.

It is raining so hard and we are three miles from our place. Decided to get an Uber and head back to avoid walking in the rain. I would have loved the walk but we are all tired of being wet. So on the Uber we went. It was a long ride back and made me realize how far we had walked. 

Nobody was sure they needed another meal except me. I am hungry for some reason and feel like I need dinner. We played Taboo for a while and then headed out to a place Mohan found that is close to us with good reviews. When we got there, there was a bit of a wait. The evening is pleasant and we stood outside and enjoyed the night air. We went in after about 15 minutes. The seating was Japanese style and we had to leave our shoes at the door. I’m not sure about this sitting on the floor thing with your legs straight out in front of you but we made it work. Dinner was delicious. The best thing was steamed vegetables. Like heaven to me. We also had a fish dish, some fabulous beef and some delicious noodles. We shared everything and Matt barely ate, saying he wasn’t hungry.

After dinner we headed back and fell into bed again!! So tired.