Kyoto

My buddy Dave and I just got back from a 3 day trip to Kyoto. We had a great time, saw some cool sights, met some cool fellow ex-pat tourists and generally enjoyed ourselves. Kyoto has some major history behind it seeing as it was Japan's capital for several centuries. Tokyo might be the center of modern Japan but Kyoto is still Japan's heart and soul. The people there even seemed more Japanese somehow. There are something like 1600 temples, several hundred shrines and countless assorted places of interest in Kyoto. One could spend a considerable amount of time there and not see everything worth seeing. My personal favorites of what we saw were all the Zen rock gardens. Now that I have a house out in town I'm going to build my own Zen rock garden in my back yard. We'll see how that works out. What was cool was that it snowed most of the time we were there, but none of it stuck. So we had all the coolness of walking around in falling snow without the associated wet soggy shoes. I'm putting up this picture of the Shinkansen bullet train just because I wanted to. This train is so fast it's scary (scary looking too!) but a nice way to get around Japan.