Rokudaime

Right! Time to get this thing started! Day 1 was nothing but traveling (19 hours by plane, a couple of hours by train), eating, and sleeping a little bit, so nothing happened there. Day 2, today, was when the vacation finally began in earnest, and it has been great so far! We went to Kyoto (traveling with the Shinkansen using a JR pass. Get one of those beforehand (you can't buy them once you're in Japan) if you ever decide to go on vacation to Japan. It will save you a TON of money!) and visited the Fushimi mountain and the Inari-Taisho temple and shrines there, and lo and behold, it just so happens there's a festival going on when we're visiting! Talk about luck! So, we walk up the mountain range, enjoy the scenic nature, the temples, the shrines, the foodstalls, the sight of all the Japanese girls in kimono's, and even get to participate in a (very formal) religious ceremony with the shrine maidens in front of a big crowd of Japanese people. It was kind of embarrassing...






We also ate at a small traditional place run by an old lady on the way up the Fushimi mountain:




I asked a group of Japanese girls in kimono's, in Japanese, if it would be all right if we took a picture of them, and they smiled and were totally OK with that: