Tuesday, sunny and glorious!

Today was really good...sunny and actually hot - sandals and cool pants came back out! Our plan was to visit the bamboo forest, where of course there are also many temples and shrines...but the temples and shrines have become more by-the-by as we have mostly had our fill, even though they are beautiful. So we had a 20 minute train ride to the outskirts of Kyoto on the western side. From the station we followed the trail of people all heading for the bamboo forest...there were many of them, lots of school children, not so many kimono-clad girls today...but the crowds weren’t a problem somehow, not like yesterday. Almost immediately there was the first temple - Tenryu-ji - quite famous and with an incredibly beautiful garden. you could pay just to go into the garden which Carole and I did, but Amr did the temple buildings as well, and John did neither. We had a lovely stroll through the exquisite garden, then all went along the path through the bamboo forest. This was also quite amazing. Then we reached the Okochi Sanso villa - the home of a silent movie samurai actor called Okochi Denjiro (1898-1962) who spent 30 years creating the garden. This was also worth a visit, and we had tea there (not in a ceremony, but in a tea house). The villa is high up on the hills and has a great view down on Kyoto, and to the mountains beyond.

We walked back down via another path, winding through parkland till we came to a river, the Katsura river, and ended back at Arashiyama, but this time we caught a bus back to Kyoto Station. Very relaxing and pleasant day. While at the station we bought train tickets for the journey back to Narita on Monday.

So that was lovely, then we had a little down time...John and Carole did some washing, Amr went to some store he wanted to see, I played on my iPad and started to write up the day...then as arranged at 5 o’clock we all met in our tiny room ( they have a tiny room too!) for some wine...and watched sumo wrestling on TV (sound muted!!)....hilarious....I moved my clothes off the one chair, so that someone could sit on it, and 3 on the bed. The bed is queen size...I said king size because it took up such a large proportion of the room! But it is very comfy.

Well dinner tonight was another hit. John and Carole had experienced something called Okonomi-yaki, where you cook a pancake like thing, with lots of vegetables on a grill at the table, and John found this sort of restaurant very near us. So off we trotted, and got a table straight away amazingly, (by the time we left it was totally full) and had a superb evening, and delicious food. We actually never had the pancake things, as it was lost in translation...you order from an iPad at the table, and by the end we had perfected the art of using this...but we had amazingly delicious food regardless...all brought to us to put on the grill and shared...only one slight disappointment was that chicken livers turned out to be chicken hearts (something else lost in translation) ..we will definitely go back for more experimenting. Now off to bed for a read before sleep...Les mer