Okay, this is take two for writing the second part of Sunday on the Kyoto Trip. If you think this one is not very good, I assure you that the first one I wrote was much better. This time I'm writing it outside of blogger to make sure that I'll still have the text if something goes wrong on blogger's end.

Anyway, so last time, I forgot to include that after the temple walking tour, but before we went up to the lookout at Eikan-do, Sarah stopped to take part in her favorite pasttime: taking pictures of many different things. This time some children playing at a day care right next door to the temple grounds were her subjects.

After we descended from the tower, we left Eikan-do and started on the actual Philosopher's Walk. It is a gravel trail that goes beside a small stream and through many nice looking neighborhoods. There are many tea houses and cafes beside the trail, along with random gift shops. We even saw a charity yard sale on a side street right off the trail. As always, we ran into a couple JETs from Toyama that we knew.

We passed several temples that we could've visited, but we were a little worried about the time. We wanted to make it to the temple at the end of the Philosopher's Walk, Ginkaku-ji. Ginkaku-ji means Silver Temple, or something like that. There is a very famous temple in Kyoto that is called Kinkaku-ji, or Golden Temple. The exterior is completely gold-covered, so it is impressive to look at. Ginkaku-ji is like a sister temple or something. It was supposed to be completely covered in silver. However, the lord that was paying for all this silver died after the temple was built, but before it was covered in silver. In the above picture you can see one of the original buildings of the temple (rare in Japan, since they are wooden buildings) on the left. On the right you can see the newer temple buildings, whose roofs are painted silver, I think mostly to keep with the name and original intent. You can pay to tour the newer buildings, but the old one is off limits. I didn't bother to tour the buildings since the tours were in Japanese, and the buildings were pretty new.

One thing that is famous at Ginkaku-ji besides the original building, is the silver sand patterns. In the photo from above, you can see the lines of sand in the center of the compound. There are two sand sculptures there. The one you see is supposed to represent waves on a body of water. Here's a close-up of it. The other one (not pictured here) is a big mountain of silver sand that is supposed to be Mt. Fuji. They are both fairly impressive, but what impressed me more is that it seems like all the grains of sand are perfectly in their place. I wonder how often they have to re-rake the sand to keep it so neat. The Mt. Fuji sculpture is a near perfect cone.

After seeing the sands, the trail led around to a little garden area, where I surprised Victoria with a picture. The trail climbed up to give us the view of the temple from above. Finally the trail led back down to near the historic building, which wasn't very impressive to look at it, except that it is supposed to be old. One thing that is more impressive is the 20+ foot walls that you have to walk through to enter and exit the temple area. The walls were stone for about 5 feet and then tall bushes were neatly trimmed to form the rest of the wall. Behind the bushes was a thick bamboo forest. On the way out through this area, Sarah and Victoria found a really cute Japanese baby strapped onto some man's back (I can only assume his father's). We got permission from the father and mother to pose for a picture with the baby. This was a much more amenable idea to me than Victoria's constant plans to kidnap cute Japanese children to dress in bumblebee suits and keep as her own, so I agreed to it. You can see part of the bushes behind the picture.

It was getting late, so we headed back to the subway. Unfortunately we had to walk all the way back, because there is no subway or train near Ginkaku-ji. We headed back to Sanjo Keihan (where we walked around and had dinner Sat. night) instead of returning home, because we were hungry. Sarah was feeling dizzy and needed someplace to stop. Near the metro station at Sanjo Keihan, there is a Starbucks, so we went there. I'm not a big coffee fan myself, but Sarah was really missing a good cup of coffee, so Starbucks was the next best thing. :)

I got a hot chocolate and a chocolate scone, which I haven't had in awhile. It was nice to feel like we were in a little bit of home. The menu was in English, the staff spoke English, and there were many foreigners there. Just seeing a menu with English was a nice change, because that just doesn't happen much in Toyama. My favorite restaurant in Toyama, a Nepalese restaurant, does have an English menu, so that should tell you something about the powers of a menu in English.

We got a call from Alex that she had finished work and would meet us at Starbucks. So we hung out there for awhile. We ran into some Toyama JETs at Starbucks, including Nadia. Once Alex came we walked along some of the shopping area, stopping in some stores. We eventually found our way to an eight-story book store which has a whole floor dedicated to foreign books. We spent awhile there, and Will finished work and met us there. A Japanese friend of theirs meet us there also, Akemi. She came from another area nearby. We all went out to eat after Victoria finished trying to buy all the English books in the store (she was a lit major).

More tomorrow. I've got more interviews now.