Kyoto Day 3 - Shopping and a Gold Temple

We ate breakfast at the B&B and discussed our plans with the owner. We mentioned doing laundry and he offered to do the wash for us and we would only have to take the clothes to the laundromat to dry them, which we thought was very kind of him. We had more than we thought, but they just fit in the washer.

It was raining pretty hard, so we decided that we would just head down to Gion for some shopping since it's mostly covered, and then head back after lunch to dry our clothes. We ended up finding quite a number of shops with super-mega-cute items as well as some nice furoshiki stores that we ended up buying things at. There was lots of squeals of joy and adoration from Meghan. We also encountered several stores selling "geisha" type items, like elaborate hair accessories and face paint... I guess there's a fairly big market for pretending to be a geisha. There were also quite a few stores with traditional shoes to wear with kimono. They were very beautiful but also very expensive. And also for tiny feet.

We ate lunch at a Japanese barbecue place where you grill your meat at the table. It was fairly tasty, but a bit overpriced for the amount of meat we got.

Sizzle sizzle. Tasty meats.

We went back, dried our clothes, and by the time we were done the sun was out. We headed on over to Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion. It's quite a large temple complex whose main focal point is a large pond area with a couple islands with bonzai trees and a decent sized gold temple. Like, every surface was gold leaf. I just read the Wikipedia article, and like most impressive landmarks in Japan, it has been rebuilt in the past century, and evidently as early as last century it wasn't gold-leafed. Regardless, it's still a sight to be seen.

Phoenix roof ornament

We headed back to the B&B and stopped by Curry House Co Co Ichibanya, where we had some fairly delicious curry with really awesome hand-breaded chicken katsu. Yum.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Curry.

It's an early morning for us tomorrow, with the shinkansen leaving at 8:30 to go to Hakone.

Link to Today's Pictures