Kyoto

After an emotionally exhausting day in Hiroshima and my walking marathons in Tokyo, it would have been all-too-easy to relax a little during our last day in Japan. Given the fact that a Japanese marching band had made the effort to greet us upon arrival in Kobe with songs like Under the Sea and 76 Trombones, I felt like the least I could do would be to make an effort to live it up during my last day in port.


I am the type of traveler that is willing to be adventurous—and only need a push from someone to take the plunge in traveling that hasn’t involved pre-planning or color-coding. Two students I knew from the Hiroshima trip had talked about going to Kyoto, independent of a Semester at Sea organized trip, and that sounded good to me. In another display of her wonderfulness, our Hiroshima tour guide, Rumi, provided us with directions to Kyoto, leaving us without an excuse not to go. We met at 6 AM Sunday morning and after an hour-long train ride, we arrived in Kyoto. The former capital city of Japan for more than a thousand years, Kyoto is also known as the cultural center of Japan. The city is filled with Buddhist temples too numerous to count (we later found out that someone did count; there are over 1600 temples). We hit the Nishi-Honganji Temple, the Higashi-Honganji temple, the Shosei-en Garden, the Nijo Castle, and the Kyoto Imperial Palace—it was a hot, humid, muggy day, but the scenery, the time with the students who I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten to know, and the chance to participate in a religious ceremony in a foreign tongue is something I will not forget any time soon. Japan will be missed!