Visiting Kyoto in a day is a challenge for sure, the city has a long tradition and could easily fill a week still having only scratched the surface of its sights, let alone understand the religious and historical setting in which it tempel or area is to be set. But we had single day and it was our tour guide’s task to fill it. After our group grew by some members of the orchestra to 30+ persons, a full size coach had been chartered that brought us to a lot of temples and other sights in direct sequence. That kind of “pressurized fueling” with information without my active participation makes me drop the previous piece of information once the next comes in. I did not store too much of it at the end of the day, but it might come back. Therefore I jsut share the pictures and may fill in more details afterwards:
Buddhist Sanjūsangen-dō temple (Wikipedia)
Kiyomizu-dera temple (Wikipedia)
Arashiyama (Wikipedia)
Ryōan-ji temple ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%8Dan-ji )
Kinkaku-ji temple (Wikipedia)
After that flood of impressions we could have stayed in the bus to get back to the hotel. Some of the group still wanted to see the Gion quarter, a kind of old town with classical houses, so we stepped out of the bus early to later, maybe after dinner there, find our way home by public transport on our own. It was not quite as impressive as expected there, a small group thought about having dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe in which we ran by accident. Having had no lunch all of us were decided quick to step in. After that we split up again and 3 persons took the (public) bus back to the train station where we still explored the building with its architecture (incredible 70 meters high for a train station) and a good view to the Kyoto Tower and the surrounding. A perfect ending for a day packed with impressions.
