On Sunday morning we continued our journey from Kanazawa to Kyoto. Somehow Japanese trains make Martina very sleepy!! At first sight, Kyoto appears bigger than we expected. It is actually huge with 1.5mio people. Also Japan’s old imperial capital is full of culture with more than 1000 temples and carries the reputation of the most beautiful city. So lots to see and to discover! As a starting point we visited Kyoto’s food market “Nishiki” and best-known geisha quarter “Gion” with beautiful old architecture and full of “ochayas” – traditional teahouses. After sunset we then went to see Kiyomizu temple- truly beautiful! The temple has been illuminated with a fantastic light show- only temporarily for the next weeks of cherry blossom season. Very inspiring!

Lots of more temples on our program today! Highlight was the Zen Buddhist Temple of the Golden Pavilion which is also world cultural heritage site.

Here in Japan somehow the V-sign (peace sign) is definitely the most popular pose in photographs. Even though we still do not understand the meaning, we adopted Japanese sign language on photos for the time being, as it makes Japanese always smile.. 🙂