Search Results for “Experiencing Traditional Japan”

For our second week in Japan, we left Nagasaki and went to the much bigger city of Kyoto, where we spent our first day going on a tour of the city. The first place we went to was the Golden Temple, which is a pagoda that is painted all over with gold. The tour also went to a few other temples and palaces. I really liked our last stop at Kiyomizu Temple because there were all kinds of really cool stores, called yomise, on the street leading up to it. Stefan and I had fun looking for souvenirs (I got an awesome ninja sword keychain to add to my keychain collection).

The next day we went to the Gion district of Kyoto where we stayed at a traditional Japanese inn to celebrate my Mom's birthday. They had a person come in to dress us all up in kimonos. The kimonos were kind of hard to walk in because we only had about a foot of free space inside, but it was still really fun walking around the streets in them. When we got back to the inn, we changed out of our kimonos and had a traditional Japanese dinner in our room, where we ate stuff like fish, batter fried vegetables (tempura), miso soup and fruit. After dinner, we went to a traditional Japanese tea ceremony like the one we had in Hirado, where you eat a 'sweet' before you drink the bitter green tea. We liked doing all of these traditional Japanese things and really like the food here, especially the sashimi (sushi without the rice).