On our fourth day in Japan, we could sleep longer than the other days before. We started our tour at 10 am and headed for Kyoto. Because we went with my cousin, we didn’t take the Shinkansen, so that it took us nearly two hours to Kyoto — while we could’ve been there within 10 minutes with the Shinkansen (try to do that Deutsche Bahn! ^^~)

Kyoto is the city with the highest number of shrines and temples and it was difficult for us to decide where we wanted to go. Eventually, we decided on Fushimi Inari-Taisha, a Shinto-shrine famous for its long torii alleys. When I first saw some pictures of the torii, I was really impressed, because I thought that there’re thousands of those big red gates standing in a line. But actually, there’re only some big gates. The majority is quite small ^^. Important is, when you’re inside the alleys, you must turn back. Then you can see the black engraved names of those companies and families who contributed the torii. It was really cold that day and we decided not to go the whole way to the inner shrine. Instead we walked the way back and had lunch in a restaurant, which seem to be more like a canteen decorated in style of the GDR (German Democratic Republic). It was when Moritz disvovered his liking for bentou (Japanese style lunch box).

After that we went to another temple not far away from the Inari-taisha, it was called: Tokufuji temple People there were crazy to capture the best autumn scenery picture ^^. I saw many women wearing beautiful kimonos that day…I thought:”Really nice, but cold!” ><..
Then we planned to visit the Nijo Castle and International Manga Museum. But unfortunately, the castle closes at 4 pm and we arrived there around 4.45 pm. At least we walked around the moat, although it was not voluntarily — we just didn’t know where the entrance was…haha.

Because it was really too cold and it got dark, we returned to Osaka. It’s so nice to have heated seats in trains =). We battled our way through the crowded inner city of Osaka and finally arrived at a little bar where the speciality was cocktails and takoyaki (balls of the size of golf balls with octopus filling). They were so delicious and the dried octopus they scattered on the takoyaki was coiling because of the heat. So we tried the two Osaka typical dishes — okomomiyaki and takoyaki.

That day we arrived early at the International House. Too bad that days end so early in winter, I would’ve liked to see more of Kyoto…but maybe there’ll be another chance ^^..

Anh Thu