Parents' Visit

My parents came to visit for about 12 days and we were able to cover a lot of ground! They came to school and taught with me on the last day of classes of this school year. Here they are sipping their juice boxes in the teachers' room. hehe

The next school year doesn't start until next week, so I was able to take lots of time off while my parents visited. We spent about four days in Kyoto. It was my first time in Kyoto, so I wanted to see lots of the famous sites. This is Kinkakuji, the temple of the Golden Pavilion. It was originally built by the shogun Yoshimitsu in 1397 as a retirement house, but an obsessed monk burned it down in 1950. It was rebuilt a few years later.

Nearby the Golden Temple is Ryoanji, a temple famous for it's rock garden. The garden is meticulously raked around 15 boulders. It was originally built in 1499 (years after the temple was built), but the designer is somehow unknown. No matter how you look at the garden you can only see 14 of the boulders at one time. There are several myseteries surrounding the garden.

This is Ginkakuji, the temple of the Silver Pavilion, and it was built in 1474 but was never finished because the Onin War began and they couldn't afford to put silver on the structure.

Kyoto was the capital of Japan for 1000 years. We signed up for the English tour through the Imperial Palace. The original palace was built in 794, but it burned down several times. The buildings that we saw were built in 1855. That's the throne behind my dad.

One of my favorite sites in Kyoto was the Nijo Castle because we were able to see the inside of it. The castle was home to the Tokugawa shoguns from 1626 until 1867 when shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu returned power to the imperial court. We weren't allowed to take pictures, but we were able to see beautiful murals and experience the creaking floor. We were told that the builders built the floors creaky on purpose so that they would be able to hear intruders.

The grounds have two impressive moats. This is one of the gates and wall from inside the grounds.

This is another Buddhist temple called Sanjusangendo. Inside there are 1000 statues and one large statue of the deity called Thousand Armed Kannon.

This is Kiyomizudera, a Buddhist temple on the side of a mountain in Kyoto. I'm sure we were there in the wrong season or a week too early at least, but I don't understand what the big deal is about this one. It's the only place in Japan that's up for being voted in as one of the "New 7 Wonders of the World." It was traditionally believed that if you jumped off the side of it and survived, that your wish would come true. They've since banned any attempts. There are also two love stones here that guarantees love if you walk with your eyes closed from one to the other. Normally there's a beautiful view of Kyoto from the temple, but we were there on a hazy day.


I thought the Shinto shrine Fushimi Inari Taisha was one of the more amazing places in Kyoto. All shrines have tori gates at the entrance, but this one has thousands of wooden tori gates lining a path that hikes up and down a mountain. This shrine has a fox twist to it because foxes are believed to be the messenger of the harvest deity Inari, to whom the shrine is dedicated. There were lots of fox statues around the shrine.


I think we were a week too early because most of the cherry blossoms looked like they were on the verge of blooming. We still saw a few. Here are a few random pictures I took. Some were from the Kyoto Botanical Garden.




My dad had his heart set on riding the fastest train in the world, so we took the shinkansen/bullet train to Hiroshima for one day while we were staying in Kyoto. It didn't feel like it was going very fast, but it's able to go 186mph. The ride was amazingly smooth. By the way Dad, I think there's a faster train in Shanghai.

I already posted quite a bit about Hiroshima (October), but I think these pictures are worth posting. This is a sunset view of the A-bomb Dome.

And this is the tori gate of Itsukushima shrine at sunset.


I still have a little more to post once I transfer pictures from my brand new camera! Plus I asked my parents to write a little about their experience, so hopefully they'll get those written and I can post them. I'll let them tell the stories.