Uji

We made a quick stop in Uji on our way between Koyasan and Kyoto. Uji is most famous for its matcha tea, so it was the perfect place for our first tea tasting as well as an opportunity to try all the green foods! Green foods included matcha ice cream, a matcha pancake filled with red bean paste, matcha mochi dumplings, and matcha soba noodles. The owner of the noodle shop even gave me a little card with English instructions on how to eat the noodles. This was great since we had just been talking about how we had wished especially for our temple meals that there had been some kind of instruction on which of the small plates should be added to rice, wrapped in nori, etc.

We also walked around Byodo-in, the temple featured on the 10yen coin. There were a couple of cherry blossom trees here that had started to bloom as well!Read more