My trip to Kyoto

I went to Kyoto today and it was really fun. All this past week, when I would tell my students that I was going to Kyoto on Sunday, they would say, "Oh wow, the leaves are changing right now and it will be SO BEAUTIFUL!!!!!" I kind of thought to myself, "yeah, whatever, I've seen red leaves before, no big deal." But some of the trees had such red, red leaves that they looked like they were on fire. It was really cool.
So the first Buddhist temple we went to was called Sanjusangendon. This temple is pretty famous because it has 1,001 statues inside this super old building of this Buddhist deity called Kannon. The inside of the temple was really really enormous. When I thought that I had reached the end of the 1,001 statues, I realized that I was only half-way! Truly an amazing thing to see. Here are two pictures of the statues inside. These were taken from the middle of the room, so you can see one shot is looking left down the room, and the other is looking down the right.






















After we finished looking at the Kannon statues, we saw a bunch of people choosing these pieces of paper out of a big box. The deal was that you have to pay 100 yen and then you get to choose a fortune from the box. Your fortune can range from really good, to not so good. We all paid the 100 yen and drew one. Mine said "good" but its predictions for my health said that I should watch out for diarrhea! Seriously! It also said that my true love will be late and that I won't marry for a long time. If you don't like your fortune, you're supposed to go outside and tie it to this wooden rack sort of thing. I guess this is kind of like rejecting the fortune. So of course I didn't like mine, so I tied it to the wooden fence thing. Here's a picture of a kid doing the same thing. All of those white things are people's fortune papers.


Here is a picture of another building outside the Sanjusangendon temple:

We went to maybe five different temples or shrines today. Here's a picture of the outside entrance into one of them. It's hard to tell from this picture exactly how humongous this thing is, but imagine that if I was standing in front of that fence sort of thing in the middle, I would only come to about half way up one of the planks. Very enormous.

On our way to see another temple, we took a long, long uphill path that had cemeteries on both sides. I guess Japanese people are usually cremated and so their whole family's ashes (and I mean generations and generations) go into these like 3' by 3' and 5' high stone monument type things. Some we saw were more than 400 years old. We kept walking up this hill and the graves were just covering the hill on both sides, all the way up to the top. So many! Then when we got to the top and looked down the hill to the right and into the valley, we saw thousands of them. Here's a picture from the top:

There were loads more too, going down and down the valley there. Imagine basically a sea of these things. Here's a picture of what they look like closer. You can see how each family's crematorium thing is just centimeters away from the next family's. They really really pack them in like sardines.

It was really crowded everywhere we went today because like I said, apparently this is prime leaf-viewing time for people in Japan. This is a picture from the temple that was at the top of the cemetery hill.

At this temple, they had this thing where people would throw some money into a big box and then grab these long red tassles and start ringing some big bells. They would ring the bells for a while and then start praying. Here's a picture of some women ringing the bells:

This is what they're standing in front of while they pray:

It was a great day. Going to a really historic and traditional place like this reminds me that I live in a foreign country. Here's a picture of the people I went with standing underneath one of the many, many red maple trees we saw today. From the left: Becky, Masashi and Rachel.