More Temples

Our second day in Kyoto was spent riding buses from temple to temple. (The buses in Kyoto are fantastic.) We went to the Golden Pavilion, silver Pavilion, Ryoan-ji, and Ninna-ji. The best thing about temples in Japan are the gardens. They do give you a nice sense of tranquility. Steve Lin recommended the Zen rock garden at Ryoan-ji, and it is a UNESCO site, so off we went. I'm probably too technical to fully appreciate the rock garden but really all I saw was a bunch of rocks laid out in raked sand. My brother and I did get a couple of pictures looking pensive as we pondered the meaning of the garden.


For dinner we hopped on the train (the JR rail pass is also fantastic) to Osaka to meet up with my friend Madoka, whom I met in Beijing. She took us to a yummy sushi place, which was both affordable and gave really big portions of fish. They were even nice enough to cut up the fish since the pieces they gave us were to big to fit in our mouths in one piece. According to Madoka, the place was fairly traditional, mostly because they made their sushi by hand. She says most places use machines now. It was nice to finally be able to communicate with someone in Japan even though we had to go through Madoka. Apparently they noticed she spoke English to us and asked her, "What's the matter with these people?" Then we had a nice conversation about Ichiro, Matsui, and yakitori.