Yesterday: 東本願寺 and 京都駅

Yesterday was a national holiday (Fall Equinox), so there were no school-related activities to be done, and everybody made plans to go out and about. I was initially going to go to the Kyoto National Museum, but after talking with a bunch of people decided to go along with Aoife, Alysson, Bob, and Pernilla on a bike trip to Fushimi-inari-taisha, a shrine in the southern part of Kyoto photographically famous for its hall of gates.

The original plan got changed when Alysson's rear tire decided that holding on to air was too high of a demand. We started asking people if they knew where any bike shops are, but had no luck. Since it was a national holiday, all the bike shops, as far as everyone knew, were closed. So eventually we got to a service station (with Alysson pushing her bike almost the entire time), and got some air shot into the thing... which did no good at all.

So, we modified the plans to fit the situation, and went to nearby Higashi Honganji, another of the big, famous temples. This one is specifically famous for being big: the Founder's Hall is one of many buildings that is claimed to be the biggest wooden structure in the world (there are other temples in Japan even that claim the same thing). But my typical luck seems to have followed me across the Pacific; we managed to pick the one temple in Kyoto that's under restoration construction work. The Founder's Hall was wrapped in a gargantuan temporary metal building to protect it during the restoration effort, and will remain as such until some time in 2011. Because of this, the Founder's Hall was closed, although we could still go on the rest of the normal tour. It was still interesting and impressive, but of course I felt that it would be quite a lot nicer without scaffolding and orange cones.

After the temple, we started going to Kyoto Station, but got distracted by a restaurant and stopped for lunch. It looked like a perfectly average noodle shop, and had a food bar on the ground floor, but since there were five of us we got seated upstairs at a traditional table. I decided I would order something I've never had, and went with ジンギスカン (jingisukan) - mutton, or, as the menu put it, barbequed ram. It was amazingly good. I neglected to take any pictures of the food, but some of the others thought of it, and I may append the day's album later.

Stomachs full, we started once again toward Kyoto Station, which is the biggest building in Kyoto and the second biggest train station in Japan. It has things like department stores, a movie theater, an amphitheatre, a bunch of restaurants, and who knows what else, in addition to being the city's central bus and train hub. I didn't know about the size of the place ahead of time, and it took me a while to figure out that the train station wasn't near what looked like a row of really big buildings, it was what looked like a row of really big buildings. It has about the same volume as Ritsumeikan's Kinugasa campus. We made the long ascent to the roof, passing alongside an amphitheatre with about 11 floors of seating, which was mostly full of people watching a high school band exhibition or competition of some sort. The roof offered pretty good views of Kyoto in most directions; after a bit of orientation I was able to pick out the school campus in the distance. The bulk of the building was also open-air. I'd like to see it in rain or snow.

After that, it was homeward bound. Alysson left her bike at the station unlocked, hoping someone will steal it before she goes back to retrieve it so that she has an excuse to buy a nicer bike, so she took the buses home. The rest of us rode. Between riding through the city and the view from the station, I have a much better sense of the size of the city and the overall character of it. Just seeing the city and riding around in the cooler weather would have been a good day; the tourist bits and the company made it even better.

Direct link to the photo album of the day