In case you missed it, Part 1 is here.
I was on a bit of a tighter schedule than the last time I was in Kyoto, so instead of heading above ground to see the scenic part of the station, such as this:
I stayed underground to head to the subway, and found this hostage situation taking place:
Just kidding! They're kids on a school trip surrounded by their chaperons...I think!
After quickly checking into the hotel, it was off to try to sneak in a trip to Arashiyama. There was a bus route way to get there, and a train route way of getting there, and after the bus took longer to show up than I was hoping, I called an audible to take the train instead.
There is no way that I can see this name, and not think of Hina:
Anyway, there's no way to be unsure if you've made it or not, Arashiyama happened to be the end of the line:
There was a lot of things to see. Things like old bridges...
...stairs that lead up the mountainside...
...my first peek at sakura for the season...
But really, I wanted to see the forest and the trees...the bamboo trees!
I thought they were majestically fantastic!
Of course, here's an obligatory picture of me.
I could have asked some non-Western tourists to take my picture, but I flaked out and asked a European instead. More on Europeans shortly.
Did I tell you that I like pictures of stairs?
And rivers?
I don't know who she is, but I liked the conceptual composition of this shot.
Nifty looking boats.
Oh, I mentioned something about Europeans. So as I was wandering on my way back, some Europeans stopped to ask me if I knew where the monkeys were. Monkeys? Didn't you follow a map, I wondered? They insisted they did, and still couldn't find them. One fellow asked if I would help them look for the monkeys, and was saddened when I didn't seem interested. I tried to point them in the right direction and left. (Alert folks will remember that I quickly summarized this story here.)
Here's the map showing the route that you would have to take to get to the monkeys. Yikes. What was I thinking? Once I paid, I was all in to get to the top before the park closed.
At least they had these fun little quizzes going on along the route:
(They had the same quizzes in Japanese on different sign boards)
If you stayed inside, it felt like you were the exhibit and the monkeys were free.
As fun as that was, the sun was starting to set, so I quickly made my way back. One big thing that I was really looking forward to would start right around sundown, and I didn't want to miss a thing.
More in Part 3.
-- wake.eat.sleep.