Toriiiii

Bamboo!

Yes, we went to a bamboo forest. Which is pretty massive, I didn't know bamboo could grow this tall. Or that it would be this strong. It was pretty impressive.

After the forest, we went to another temple, I forgot its name.. sorry. But it had a nice garden! Yay! We walked around there for a bit and I saw this couple who were about to get married, ofcourse I got pictures.

Then we went to a supermarket to buy lunch. You may think us crazy, but even supermarket food here tastes great! If you take the right stuff, and not chicken liver, like I did. Anyway, our driver knew a great place to eat our lunch and it was indeed a great place. After finishing our meals, we walked around for a bit and noticed a few cherry blossoms! Woohoo! And soon we were on our way again. To I think the most impressive shrine I've been to: Fushimi Inari Shrine.

Why is it so impressive? Well.. There are thousands, of torii gates. Let that sink in for a while. Thousands. I kinda like torii gates. They're one of the reasons I came to Japan for. And one I failed to mention in my prologue! This is a place I've been wanting to go for quite a while. It's such a shame we did not have a lot of time here.. I didn't go to the top op this mountain. So I'll have to go back here once more.

Walking through this gates was really something. It was crowded, yes, but still I found myself alone. I loved it.
I caught up with the group and there I asked Ayako about the inscriptions on these torii and she told me the inscriptions are the names of those that donated these torii gates. I also told the group that I really want a torii gate of my own and I found just the place! Or actually, we ran into another couple of our group as they were standing in front of this shop, where they sold torii gates. They just said to eachother they should tell me about this shop when I ran into them, so this is where I bought my very own torii gate. With my name engraved on it! Or actually marked, with a marker. And not really my name. I thought that writing my name in Katakana (the Japanese alphabet used for foreign words) would be boring, as it would only have two symbols (くん), it would sound somewhat the same though (Kun). So I asked for a different name to be written. It now says コーエン  (Kōen), which I liked a lot more. Plus it says "Kyoto" on the top. Could also have said the name of this place, and it did look cooler, but I liked it to be Kyoto more. And then there's the date that I bought it, April 3rd.

By the way, I have a question for you. How many times have I said "torii gate"? 
Winner gets a cookie!

For dinner, we went to Kyoto station, a massive station, as it includes a mall. But we were on our way to the restaurant floor. I think it was 10F. We took the stairs, or escalators and we saw this magnificent display of lights on the stairs. There was a movie playing, on the stairs! Whoa! Awesome.