Well, I was determined to write yesterday, but after having spent a great deal of time in the air without sleep I kinda crashed for fifteen hours. I’m not going to complain, I can tell you that much. After travelling into the Gion district via train yesterday, I found my hostel, checked in, and absolutely passed out until the early morning. When I woke up, Kyoto was completely covered in snow. Needless to say, it was beautiful, and photos will surely follow.
Not too much to report from yesterday, actually. I checked into the hostel and spoke a bit with the caretaker, but that was about it. It’s strange, because the hostel is completely full and yet I have not seen any of the other tenants in the day that I’ve been here. Part of that, I’m sure, is due to the fact that I’ve been passed out in bed for the better part of the day. Ah, well.
In direct response to my summer trip to Nagoya, I went out to find some temples and shrines. Being really tired, I kinda kept the trip confined to one temple. I went to the Honganji Buddhist temple, which houses one of the oldest wooden statues of the Amida Buddha in Japan. And while my goal was to go and see the statue, I was unprepared for the magnificence of the temple itself. There’s two main buildings and two smaller buildings, the former being the actual worship halls and the latter being the buildings where the monks live and the libraries filled with hundreds of sutras. While I was there, I was trying to think of a temple in Nagoya that I had visited that was similar to Honganji, but none of them really came close.
Like I said, the jet lag has kind of caught up with me, so I’m going to be a bit shorter in this post than the others. However, I do have a bunch of photos that I’m going to upload from my visit to the temple, so maybe that will make up for the brevity of this post.
Dan in Japan 