Today we saw Gion and Kiyomizu Temple in the morning and then we headed back to our site to review or site analysis with Stan. The day started out cloudy so I wore long pants but by mid afternoon the sun came out and it was Hot. By days end I probably got too much sun so I'm going to have to remember the sun screen tomorrow. The group met at 9 but I was a couple minutes late because I had to find the room key to put my laptop away. There is only one key to the hotel room that I have to share with my roommate Dusty. To complicate things more, you have to return the key to the front desk when ever you leave the hotel. So I had to find Dusty who wasn't in our room and as it turned out, had already turned in our key. By the time I got there, the group was just about done- very short meeting today.
We took the bus to west to Gion, very close to where we had dinner Saturday. Gion is historically the entertainment district of Kyoto. It is full of old buildings that house restaurants and private tea gardens where you find Geishas. We walked several streets on our way to see today's main attraction: Kiyomizu Temple.
The temple was founded in 798 but the current building designs date back to 1600's. Some of it was quite new as they just finished renovating it last year. It is famous for it large overhanging veranda that is supported by 15meter tall wood scaffolding. The veranda had a great view of Kyoto but was a bit scary to walk on because it had a good downward slope to it, like it was slowly succumbing to gravity and with the large crowed standing on it, I was a bit worried until Stan told me it was one of the things they replaced during the recent renovation. It was too crowded to really get in some sketching there, so I need to work on that tomorrow.
On the way down, Stan suggested we try the Shaved Ice that the cafe was selling. (Some had brought it up earlier in the day). Shaved ice is a Japanese treat similar to a snow cone but served in bowl and the ice is very fine almost like snow. They only had a few flavors and the closest to something I liked was strawberry. Luckily it didn't taste anything like strawberry, more just a generic red sugar flavoring and turned out to be a nice treat. Don't know if it was really worth 400yen but it was nice to take a break sit in the shade.
After that, we split up as some wanted to go back to the hotel for lunch and some of us wanted to do lunch at the site instead. The bus ride there was long and was even longer because half way through there was shift change and we sat for a while as the new driver had to replace the name tags, check the brakes and set all of the mirrors. I wish had gotten a picture of the driver standing on top of the payment machine, trying to reach one of the mirrors rather than getting out of his booth. Definitely not standard procedure. We stop and bought some sandwiches for lunch as we walked.
At the site I finished up a couple of sketches and took a bunch of photos and panoramas. I got reviewed at 3:00 and all went well. Afterwords I filmed some at the site. I still need to bring my tripod down there and get some really nice footage.
Dinner was from grocery store again and I bought some fried pork and got a little pizza to cook for lunch.
Photos Day 7
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