Today we left our lovely Kyoto AirBnB, Kinse Inn, and went to spent one night in a luxurious ryokan. We had a little time in the morning to do some more things in Kyoto, but once we really settled into our ryokan, we decided to spend the evening in. Here are some highlights, followed by the photos I posted to Instagram that day:
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Today we went to Arashiyama, an area on the outskirts of Kyoto with lots of interesting and fun things to see and do. It was kind of rainy, but that didn’t stop us from enjoying the day. Here are some highlights, followed by the photos I posted to Instagram that day:
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On our second full day in Kyoto, our legs so tired from walking so much, we decided to rent bikes so we could get around the city a little easier and see more things that are farther apart. Turns out the bikes we rented were fixies, so we ended up wrecking our legs in a whole different way.

Here are some highlights, followed by the photos I posted to Instagram that day:
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The first thing many travel books like to point out is that countries you are visiting are not monolithic – one area will have certain traits, while another will be almost completely different in foods, personality, priorities. Some of this is that some “country” borders are very arbitrary, not taking into account geographic differences. And some appear to be because of long-reaching traditions or outlooks that have changed in some areas while staying the same elsewhere.

In the case of planning our trip, we didn’t want it to be city to city to city with a focus on being in the newest and modern accommodation – we mixed it up, even if it meant bouncing from an apartment to a hotel to something else.

The photos from above are our first place in Kyoto – the lovely Kinse Inn, which is a 200 year old building which is a pile of history. In some cases, you want to advocate for a business you thought the world should know about – in this case, they’re getting such great business over the years, we were the ones lucky enough to get slotted in.

Besides the clearly wonderful look of the place, was a sense of serenity and quiet within this area that just really slows down the intense pace of the trip. Kyoto is still a city, but the streets and wards were just bundled with all sorts of neat historic callbacks.

Kyoto and the surrounding area have a lot of space for the shrines, and so when we went to them, you got a real eyeful:

The differences have been delightful, to be sure.

This was our first full day in Kyoto. We had planned to do a full-day bike tour, to see a lot of the sights and get a better sense of the city, but we found out on the train on the way here that the tour was cancelled due to bad weather. That was a bummer, and we scrambled to figure out what things we should do today instead.

Here are some highlights, followed by the photos I posted to Instagram that day:

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On this day we left Tokyo for Kyoto. Here are some highlights, followed by the photos I posted to Instagram that day:

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In Tokyo, literally no one spoke to us unless we were doing business with them in some way. So, it’s been interesting to see that change in other parts of the country. A couple days ago we had three unexpected encounters with people in one day. Continue reading →