Kyoto [Part I - Lots of Tori]

Daruma - for writing your years wish on...

We woke up a bit late on Saturday morning and had to rush out of the house with no breakfast to get to the shinkansen [新幹線] on time. Unfortunately, we tried to late to get reserved seats for our journey down to Kyoto [京都] and had to fight for seats in the unreserved carriages. Which, on the brightside, meant that our tickets were a few hundred yen cheaper...Because we got on to the train at the start of the journey, it wasn't too bad. I amazed everyone with my knowledge of the fact that the chairs on the shinkansen swivel so that you can change the forward facing seats to face your friends. We had 6 seats to 4 of us for most of the journey, which took just over 2 hours, but the closer to Kyoto that we got, the more people that got on, with few people getting off. Soon our carriage was packed with people, standing everywhere they could, in the aisles and doorways. Nearly everyone got off at Kyoto, we finally managed to get out of the station to try and find a reasonably sized locker to put our larger luggage in so that we could get straight to the business of sightseeing. We managed to find two lockers which would fit our luggage in, but it seemed that no sooner had we put our luggage in, other people were walking past, hoping that we were vacating the locker...it wasn't even 10am and practically all the lockers in the station had gone.

We then grabbed a taxi to head to our first call of the day, Fushimi Inari Temple [伏見稲荷大社] , and a lovely sunny day it was... Inari is the God of rice and prosperity and the temple is famed for its tori....

The first shop that we saw after we got out of the taxi, had some ceramic frogs hiding under the table of daruma...

We walked around a little admiring the temples and sakura in full bloom...

Then we managed to find a back way to the main attraction of this temple....hundreds of tori (the red gates) lining a path up to a shrine on top of the hill.

There were lots and lots of tori...followed by yet more tori. There were even tiny tori, placed as offerings/wishes at smaller shrines along the path. And at the top shrine, we finally found out why there had been a group of men in business suits climbing up the hill on a saturday... they were making an offering to the shrine for their business...

The shrine had several offerings already laid out, people purposefully opened rice cracker snacks, sake and other foods on the alter, with some leaving behind their business cards tucked into the blind.

Salary men with the mini tori and offerings for sale