pictures

Okay, so these pictures are pretty much in reverse order, but I'll just try to go through them the same way. I was lucky enough to be able to go to Kyoto with a friend who lives down near Kobe, not that we were really asking many questions.

This is Kiyomizudera, seen from a walkway built along the side of a steep hill (can I call it a small mountain?) that you get to once you've walked up through the entrance and gone through that main veranda.  Most pictures of Kiyomizu are taken from this side, for obvious reasons. It was cloudy that day, and early afternoon, so the lighting for pictures wasn't so hot. There was more behind us on the other side, but it was all under construction, so all I could really see was scaffolding.

This is a little earlier on. That building comes out over a giant scaffold, in part, but is also built into the side of the hill, so it's not completely sitting on stilts.  Still, the whole thing felt very fragile somehow, even though the support beams were ginormous, like every other temple I've been to.

This little row of tables was actually after going around the side and back down to the bottom.  This is a cafe or something, where you can take your shoes off and sit and drink coffee or something, and look down into the trees on the left side.

just something along the way

I remember taking this from the bottom, but didn't walk up to see what was there for some reason.

this is right in the middle of the main building that sits in the trees in the first photos.  You're usually not allowed to walk right in to where people are praying to take pictures like a baka gaijin, though I'm sure there are a lot of photos of the interiors of temples floating around the internet.  They're usually very fancy. I'm happier taking pictures of the woodwork anyway, though.

You can see that building that I mentioned, covered in scaffold on the back right of this one- this is facing east, I think.  You come in from the west, walk east and turn south, turn around to take pictures, and then go downhill and come back around north/east at the bottom.

looking west?

I think that spot down there in the center is the aforementioned 'kiyo mizu' (pure water)

These red/white buildings are at the entrance - there are all kinds of technical terms and reasons for them in the history of Japanese temple architecture that I should know by now, but don't.  So for now, they're red/white buildings...

So we found our way up to Kiyomizu from sort of a back road, which was a little further south than the main road, I think.  It ran east-west on the side of the hill, with a bunch of small houses and shrines on the upper, norther side, and a giant cemetery built into the steep, southern side. This was one of them.  I think a lot of small groups of shrines are on private property, or that people work as caretakers of the shrines on public property.  Either way, you will often see a residence and a group of shrines all in one place, sometimes fenced in and sometimes not.  It's a  very interesting setup, moving to visit, and something sadly missing from our landscape, dominated as it has been by christianity. The cat may be a housepet, but like all the park cats in Osaka, who knows.  They weren't very fond of people.
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This is the road leading up.  It's probably about 6 or 7 feet wide.  Most side streets out here are about that, or if they're supposed to be two-way, they might be 10-12 feet wide.  But cars here are usually smaller, too, so it works out. Sort of.

You never get far without coming across a vending machine around here.  

I think this was where the road started.  We had just walked out the back of another tiny, almost empty, beautifully maintained park that was behind me on the right when I took this. 

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This was the outer wall of a completely different place, some huge garden that we didn't pay to go into, because there were way too many places to see in Kyoto for one afternoon.

.....

Aaaaaaand all these are from Namba, an insane shopping-type neighborhood that might be something like if you crossed Times Square, Haymarket, Faneuil Hall and every other overcrowded urban market you can think of, mushed them all together, and then, well, I guess I really can't describe it very well.  There are at least two Starbucks and a Mister Donut, though, in case you were wondering.  There are a lot of large chain stores out here, including plenty of western ones, but small, I mean tiny family-owned businesses are everywhere, too.  EVERYWHERE.  Which is nice if you don't want to hand all your hard-earned tourist money over to large corporations.  I have been meaning to take some pictures of the local market streets too, but it's so awkward sometimes

I remember this side street off of a side street- it had to have been less than 3 feet wide.
I think in older cities, these kinds of narrow streets are common, but in a relatively new, ridiculously large place like America, you never see them, so for me at least, the novelty of ultra-narrow, dark and winding alleys like this still hasn't worn off.  Though I have yet to find anything I want or need once I've been down them, other than photos.  If I had friends in Osaka and/or was a meat eater, I would never be able to cover much ground, because I'd be stopping every 20 feet to try a new place.