Last days in Kyoto - Fushimi Inari

Another update from Japan :D I've had a lot of time right now so I'm posting two days in a row! Today its been terribly raining all day, so it was hard to motivate myself to get out of the hostel. I went and checked out the downtown, but I'm still a bit tired and theres the terrible rain and yeah, I didn't feel like wandering around in the rain for long. But I know the city is beautiful when the sun comes out! So... I'm waiting! :D

And tomorrow I finally move into my dorm! Once I finally have a place to live and am all set up I'll feel a lot more comfortable roaming around the city :D

So, since there isn't a whole lot of interesting stuff to report from today (seeing as my trip to downtown consisted of withdrawing money for moving in tomorrow, getting passport pictures taken for my foreigner registration card [in Japan you just go to a photobooth, except its a passport photobooth! Its amazing! Literally takes one minute!!!], went and talked to someone at the cellphone store [thinking about getting an I-phone since they have ridiculous deals on them right now... but not sure!], and then ate an amazingly amazinly tasty waffle... seriously,, best waffle of my life) so I'm going to talk about what I did on my last day in Kyoto!

[UPDATE: Since I started writing this blog, 2 other Kobe University Study Abroad students have come to the hostel I am staying in. There was already one here, so that means there is a total of FOUR Kobe University Study Abroad students staying here. And EVEN MORE COINCIDENTAL is that the one who JUST MOVED INTO MY ROOM is the other UW student also going to Kobe. This is just weird. Hahahaha the other Kobe students were smart and showed up TODAY and not two weeks ago like me :P Although I think I have an advantage over them now ;D Maybe? Not that it matters!]

Seeing as I had been in Kyoto for 5 days and the only sightseeing I had participated in was going to KitanoTenmangu Shrine, I figured I better see at least ONE more famous sight. And thinking back to my previous trip to Kyoto, and what was easy to access from my hostel, I decided to go to... Fushimi Inari!

Fushimi Inari is a good example of why Kyoto is a crazy place. From the main station of Kyoto, it takes at most 20 minutes and less than 2 dollars to access, without entrance fees, one of the most beautiful and mysterious places in Japan. Well, at least from what I've seen I give it that designation! :D But seriously, Fushimi Inari is an entire mountain covered in shrine. Its not just like a shrine on top of a mountain, it is an entire mountain covered in shrines. You could spend all day walking all over the mountain, wandering through the forest and exploring all the little shrines. You've all seen pictures of it, its famous for the massive numbers of orange torii gates, which end up forming tunnels there are so many of them stuck together.

That gate way up there (its quite a hike to the top I must say) is a torii gate. There are so many of them that:

It looks like this in places. (Both of these pictures are from when I went last year and therefore look sunny and bright, also surprising how much of a difference there is between pictures from the digital megazoom camera I used last year and the DSLR I use now)

Fushimi Inari is the head shrine of Inari, who is the Shinto god of business, so businesses donate these gates to the shrine, and as a result each one has a businesses name on it (you can't see it in the picture because they are written on the other side).

Unlike last year, when we went on a nice sunny day, this time I went in the RAIN! Yeah!! My last day in Kyoto was raining and looked like a Seattle day (seems like this whole week is Seattle days) but I decided to go anyway, seeing as it was my last day. And, in the end, going in the rain was actually good! I did get pretty wet and all, but the whole place got a totally different feeling in the rain. It wasn't just a crazy shrine mountain covered in twisting paths of shrines and torii gates, it was now a dark, wet, and scary shrine mountain!

I especially got that feeling at the top, where there were several people going to each shrine and praying,,, and,,,, I dont know if it was just their singsong voices or the specific sutras of Fushimi Inari or just that it was a scary rainy day, but it seemed pretty creepy wandering around a place that looks like this:


With the sound of chanting floating through the air. (Remember you can click on the pictures to make them bigger :D , Fushimi Inari is a pretty detailed place ;D)

But either way, it turned out great! Had a good hike, got some good pictures (although I mainly used my film camera so those won't show up for a while!), and got to see the amazing Fushimi Inari for a second time! Once I reached the top it even got sunny for me for a while :D

Wandering around this place though, I realized that ancient Japanese culture is about just as incomprehensible to me as like... going to an Egyptian shrine. Even with what I know about Japan, I have no idea what is written anywhere on the ancient shrines. I have no idea exactly why there are so many little shrines all over the place, or what the piles of mini torii gates are doing everywhere. But, it certainly feels comfortable and wellknown to me as a part of Japan, even though I don't understand it!

Oh and another great thing about Fushimi Inari is that it isn't crawling in tourists. Of course there weren't a lot when I went in the rain, but even when I went last year on a nice day it was pretty empty, especially at the top, the best part. The lower shrines are full of people, but it seems most people, especially foreign tourists, don't bother to climb to the top, instead you just see a lot of old Japanese people. So its a good quiet place to go :)

Picture time!

1300 years of shrine build-up results in this. Its like urban crowding, or being in a shrine grocery store or something.

And then there are areas like this, with wide paths and well separated shrines. Kind of like the upper-class shrine suburbs or something.

One unfortunate part of Fushimi Inari is that places to sit are sadly few. Especially in the rain xD unless you want to go to one of the awesome little mountain top restaurants. I cannot for the life of me figure out how you get store stocks to the top of a shrine-mountain, but they somehow do it .

Oh and another note, that orange is REAL. In the rain camera sensors interpret it really strongly, so I actually turned DOWN the saturation to the realistic level you see here. Its definitely quite the contrast between hundreds of years old stone shrines covered in moss and brightly colored torii gates (which are obviously not hundreds of years old with that color!)

Oh and also in my last few days in Kyoto, I went to a Japanese bar! My nunim Heson works part time at a Japanese bar, called an Izakaya, so I stopped there after her work! This place was super classy though, nothing like the traditional more bar-like izakayas, but it was quite fun! Extremely expensive, but fun! And tasty! And I drank my first alcoholic beverage since I turned 20 (legal drinking age here), omgosh! And while a macha cocktail was certainly tasty... I still think I'll skip on expensive alcohol from now on!!! Apparently usually going to an izakaya with a group of friends costs at minimum 3000 yen (about 33 dollars) per person,,, just for drinks and then you buy food on top of that... soooo yeah, I'm lucky it wasn't that kind of izakaya ;D And they had good food! I had jellyfish salad, a kind of fried potato thing, wasabi chicken (loving wasabi more and more every day :D) chicken... stomach? yeah stomach, and various other things, too many to remember oh no!

Before that I had made gyoza with Mizuho at her apartment though (speaking of which, making gyoza is a very fun and rewarding experience! :D.. not to mention tasty!) so I was really full! Izakaya and making gyoza in the same evening is tough! Lucky I could handle it. Mom and dad, don't you worry, I am eating well :D

And also the day after that (which was the day I went to Fushimi Inari, so going to the izakaya was the day before Fushimi) we had a mini drinking party at Mizuho's! Hahahaha the only reason I'm specifically talking about this is because, if you didn't know already, I never drink, and pretty much hate the flavor of all alcohol, so going to the izakaya and drinking at my friends house were new experiences! But, seeing as I don't like the flavor of alcohol, we brought out the heavy stuff,... Kahlua!! Hahaha.... I certainly like the flavor of that stuff, but I don't quite like the idea of a sweet coffee-like drink that will get you drunk if you drink too much of it.... hmmmm somehow that just seems kind of silly to me!! Seeing as I like my sweet drinks!
Oh but also we bought cream puffs (cream puffs in Japan are a really popular pastry, and soooo tasty), and also Mizuho had found some strange food earlier in the day and had me try it: chocolate korokke (korokke is usually like a fried patty of mashedish potato, but this was a fried patty of... chocolate :O ) along with yakisoba korokke (korokke filled with fried noodles!) and a chikuwa shuumai! (chikuwa is like a fishcake usually in kind of a tube shape, soooo good especially with cheese inserted into it, and shuumai is a chinese dumpling).

Anyway sorry too much food talk !! I'm going to actually go eat dinner now, rice with Wasabi Furikake! (Rice seasoning stuff :D ) Followed up by purin! (Japanese pudding, which is totally different than American pudding strangely, very good stuff :D).

Thanks for reading :D