13 April 2009

Today started yet another week in Kyoto and leaves only two more weeks of staying in this area. It sounds like such a short amount of time when I think of it like that, but I have been seeing a lot of sites, so it’ll be exciting to start all over again in a new location. I had Japanese language class this morning, as usual, and we met with Don immediately afterwards for Arch 480. Since the Kyoto Community Center isn’t open on Monday, we were very fortunate to be able to use our language sensei’s extra classroom to study in with Don. We presented our conceptual designs for our next studio project, and that was it. Tomorrow we have appointments to visit and tour Shugakuin Imperial Palace in groups of four, similar to when we visited Katsura Detached Palace. That should be really exciting. In the morning, we will visit the Gold and Silver Pavilions with Don, then my group’s tour time is at 1:30pm.
So after class with Don today, most people were going to visit Tadao Ando’s Garden of Fine Arts in Kyoto, but I had already seen at the end of last week. Instead, Trudy and I went to see Sanjusangendo Temple located north-east of our apartment. The great hall houses 1,001 life-sized wooden statues of Kannon plated in gold flake, and the hall itself was the longest wooden structure at 394 feet long. Walking into the hall initially and viewing the statues for the first time was so incredible; it cannot even be quantified into words. I was literally speechless. It was just unbelievable. It made the 600 yen entrance fee totally worth the cost! The rest of the temple grounds were very meager, and there wasn’t really anything else to see within the temple grounds except the statues. If I ever visit Kyoto in the future, I want to go visit Sanjusangendo again!
After Sanjusangendo Temple, I don’t think anything could’ve rivaled its magnificence. We visited Toyokuni Shrine, Chishakuin Temple, and Myohoin Temple. These were all much smaller then Sanjusangendo, and almost no people were at these ones. I think everyone was at Sanjusangendo! It was hot outside again, so we decided to walk back to our apartment since there was no direct route from our location at the temples to our apartment. It took about 45 minutes to walk back, but it was a nice walk. It was actually very eye-opening since we saw areas that weren’t as new and populated as the area we had lived in before. It wasn’t unsafe or dirty, but it was just different. Trudy didn’t like it at all, but I found it very interesting since it was a different aspect of the city that neither of us had seen up until that moment.