I met a girl yesterday in the Kyoto tourist information office. Turned out she's Australian and has been traveling around the world for a few months now. I suppose calling her a girl is inappropriate. She's actually a fully fledged doctor, having recently graduated from medical school. We decided to watch the Daimonji fire together, and trekked all the way east, and found some obscure temple on the top of a hill behind a web of houses and alley ways dotting the far corner of north east Kyoto. Well at least the place seemed to be obscured to us foreigners, all the Japanese seemed to knew that it was a good spot to watched the fire, and showed up en mass.
We split up today and she's off to Shirakawa for beaches and Onsen. I'm on my own again, and went temple hopping.
I wasn't able to reserve a hostel for yesterday before I left Canada, so I had the JR office reserve a hotel for me to stay for yesterday night. The hotel was nice, if not a little too expensive. Today I moved to the hostel that I had reserved, and the place is very nice. The woman managing the place is very nice, and the place is kept clean and professional. She lives alone though, but she doesn't seems to be too lonely, with all the travelers coming in and out. She doesn't seem to speak a lick of English though, and occasionally throws out her Kansai dialect when she gets happy, which always throws me off.
Kyoto is not at all what I imagined it to be. It's a rather small city, humid and is littered with little traditional houses. However at the center of it all is a twisted mess of steel and concrete. Especially the over-sized Kyoto station, which hugs the landscape with its monstrous size, and sprawls out its aging rail ways from the center of the city. It's like a cancer that eats away at the city from its heart. It seems that Japan is full of such contradictions, industrious but full of anachronisms, automated but stuffed with manual labours, with an incredible infrastructure that one cannot help but to admire their engineering prowess, but at the same time showing a lot of questionable designs.
So far I've found all my sight seeing destinations to be average at best. Japan seems to be one giant tourist trap that almost everything they build are designed for tourists. The most enjoyable part of the trip has been the trek between the destinations and the people I've met. I've just walked all day to day to find Gingakuji, finding my way through little alleys and unarmed streets only to be total underwhelmed by the little wooden "temple".
Tomorrow I'll take a day trip to Nara, and see if it will impress me a bit more. I have to admit, I miss the grandness of Chinese architecture.
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