Japan, Day 11 (Part I)

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

This post is in honor of everyone's comments and me setting the curve in my Chemistry class (applause, please)!

The two imperial gardens that we got tickets for in Kyoto were Katsura and Shugaku-in Imperial Villa. On Wednesday, we took our tour of Shugaku-in. As we pulled up in the cab, we noticed that the couple from Southern California was at this tour too! Shugaku-in is a very popular tour (Dad said it's one of his favorites), but wow.

The garden is split into three different villas, at varying levels on the hillside. We started at the middle garden, where there is a temple built by a Japanese princess. Here is a photo of the gate to the middle garden. The tour guide spent a lot of time talking about it, but my translator tape didn't really mention it, so I'm not sure what is significant about it...

I think he was pointing out the changing fall colors when he pointed in this direction. There was one lady who kept picking up the maple leaves off the ground.

This lamp is outside of the temple at the middle garden. Dad pointed out that during a different tour, it was explained to him that the lamps have some sort of Christian significance, despite most Japanese being Buddhist. These lamps are very cool in person, though, because they are carved out of a single stone and have a lot of attention to detail.

The lady snapping the picture is one of the people from LA...She told us that the trick for staying out of trouble for taking photos when we're not supposed to "linger" on the pathways is to just stand, take the photo, and talk in English.

This was something I was curious about. I have no idea what it's for...Basically there is a wooden stick structure and it holds up some branches about three feet off the ground. No idea what it is.

This is a tea room. The shelves on the back wall are supposed to hold the morning mist and dew.

I really like the fence here. Since the entire villa is on the mountainside, there are streams flowing everywhere.

We then headed up to to the upper villa, which has a large artificial lake, formed by another stream coming down from the mountain. On the way up to the villa, we passed through what looked to be farmland.

The walk up to the top actually took my breath away in two senses. For one, it was kind of a tough climb, but also, when we turned around and got over the tall bushes, we saw these beautiful scenes...

There are tea houses all over the entire upper villa. There was one at the top where we took the photo, and there was another right next to the water. On the way to the next tea house, we passed the waterfall that feeds into the artificial lake. Notice also the stone lamp!

This is a view from the walk to that second tea house. Unfortunately, we couldn't get onto this little bridge. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can kind of see on the top of the bridge that there is a gold bird statue on top.

We did get to cross this bridge, though! It's pretty steep here, but fortunately the bridge wasn't as narrow as it seemed.

Here's a photo of the tea house that I was talking about. The windows are particularly interesting on this building.

Here's a closeup of the artificial lake. It's pretty huge, the emperor used to ride his boat around it. Even though it looks really murky, when I got closer to it, I noticed that there were tons of koi fish swimming around.

Over on the left is the boat, docked to the side of the lake.

I promise, another post coming soon...Maybe even in the next 10 minutes because I am on a roll--posting AND watching Ugly Betty.