Kyoto: Part 1/3

A group of friends and I recently made a trip to Kyoto over our long holiday weekend. Kyoto is a very historical and beautiful town filled with temples and old style buildings. It's about an hour away from Osaka by train which makes it a perfect travel destination when we feel like getting away from Osaka. Kyoto used to be the imperial capital of Japan before it became Tokyo, and it's sometimes refered to as the 'old capital.'
Since the city of Kyoto is very large, we decided to specifically visit Gion, which is the Geisha dictrict of Kyoto.
We left a little before noon on the train, which was surprisingly cheap. It only cost us about $5 dollars to travel to Kyoto.

We were immediately assailed with old buildings after leaving the train station. We decided to grab some lunch and eat it along a river edge.

 

(Photo by http://ionlyeatdesserts.wordpress.com/)

Posing for a picture outside the station with our RA Eri!

(Photo by Louise Ho)

As you can tell, I was a little hungry...

Along the water's edge were all these old, pretty buildings.

The same building.

 

The river edge was really pretty with tons of weeping willow trees around the sides.

(Photo by http://ionlyeatdesserts.wordpress.com/)

All of us eating together!

Here's a picture of the actual river.

This is a zoomed in picture under the bridge. You couldn't see it in the picture before, but both Osaka and Kyoto are surrounded by these beautiful rolling hills that look gorgeous in the rainy mists.

This guy was on top of the bridge and I'm pretty sure he was a monk. Not exactly sure what he was doing on top of the bridge though...

 

After we finished eating, we talked down a small shopping street as we made our way to the old streets were the Geisha and Maiko reside.

 

This cute miniature was in a shop display. You all know how much I love miniatures ;)

 

Then, we'd finally made it to the old street where the Geisha lived! This was the huge entrance!

The street was lined with old buildings.

Some of the buildings were shops, while others we simply couldn't tell. But we were hoping they might be Geisha houses!

An entrance to a courtyard and home.

The area was very pretty.

And of course, kimonos abounded! I was in heaven! Visitors, workers, old, and young were wearing kimonos.

 

We then stopped by a shrine, but this will have to be saved for the next post. ;)

Make sure to look out for parts 1, 2, and, 3 of our Kyoto adventure!

 

P.S. You'll notice under some photos I've put a name or link. These photos weren't taken by myself (which shouldn't be that hard to figure out since I'm in them :P) The photos with a link are done by a friend who needs some recognition for her cool photos and she wants to be known by her blog instead of her name. She writes about food, check her out if you want to know about Australian and Japanese restaurants!