Kyoto

After lunch, we walked to the Tenryu-ji Zen temple and its garden dating from the 14th century.
A bus took us back to the hotel for a one-hour break which I used to check out unsuccessfully a branch of Patagonia and another shop for wheeled holdalls.
At 16.30, we took the metro and then a local train to Fushimi Inari, a shrine with its hundreds of red torri gates to walk through. We didn't have time with evening drawing-in to go through all of them which were spread up a hillside. Some of the gates are sponsored.
We returned to Tokyo Central Station which, although seeming to be very modern, had been designed and built 30 years before, There was a multi-coloured stairway leading to the 10th floor square overlooking the city and the Kyoto Tower. There were illuminated walkways leading down to the ground-level.
Whilst the rest of the group had dinner in the Porta shop and restaurant complex under the station, Seiji took me a massive 4-storey shop under or next to the Kyoto Tower which appeared to stock everything. It had a camping section with rucksacks and holdalls. I bought a 97L North Face wheeled holdall which was more expensive than in London but on which I got 10% tax relief because, fortunately, I was carrying my passport with its stamp of Mount Fuji and a QR code. I returned to the hotel with Seiji and bought salads, pear-in-jelly and creme caramel parfait for dinner in the bedroom.
There was a noticeable lack of vegetables and fruit on menus, the latter being expensive apparently.
There were few black faces in Japan, the few being tourists or maybe students. The population is very homogenous.
Japanese started at traffic-lights on side streets, even when there was no traffic and it was raining in Kyoto.Читать далее