Following on from my previous post about what I did on Day 1 and 2 in Kyoto, this is the next and final blog post for my trip to Kyoto.
On the morning of Day 3, I booked to do a tea ceremony in a kimono. I had found this on Viator and booked in for the first session of the day. After getting to choose the colour of my kimono, I got changed with a lot of help. Underneath the kimono are layers of wraps to tighten and hold. I got my hair styled and accessories sorted and then off it was to the tea ceremony.
There were about 10 others in the room and our teacher told us about the origins of the tea ceremony and did demonstrations for us before we had a go at whipping up our matcha tea. Served as well, was a red bean sweet with a dusting of cinnamon on top and a small sugary sweet on the side.
Calm seems to not be quite the right word but from the explanations of our teacher, we were told we should eat the snacks first as you shouldn’t eat while drinking. Do one thing at a time. This was such a change from our daily lives of distracting ourselves when we are eating be that either reading or using our phones. I found the whole ceremony peaceful, revelling and paying attention to the sounds of the crockery hitting each other and even the brush when whisking our tea.
This experience reminded me to take more time when eating and to also enjoy silence and all the incidental noises too.
During the tea ceremony, I met another solo traveller and we decided to head to Arashiyama together to see the bamboo forest. I think we ended up transferring 3 times across train lines but we finally got there we decided to look for food first. My new friend had a place in mind which was the Tenryuji Temple Shigetsu– a vegetarian meal inside one of the temples.
Inside, we were seated in a hall of sorts on the floor with a small table in front of us. It was pretty quiet inside despite the scatter of people and we were surrounded by mountains on one side and the gardens of the temple on the other.
The meal that came out was beautiful as it was filling. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be 100% sure on what we were eating but it all tasted so good! There was a heated soy milk soup, tofu, mushroom and some picked/boiled vegetables. The heated soup milk soup was really tasty.
Then, another tray came out containing what I thought was all desserts. But the dessert was the fruit. Inside the bowls was a savoury soup dish containing mushrooms and a ball that tasted like it might’ve been made from chickpeas or something similar. It was such a lovely meal and an interesting restaurant. I would highly recommend it.
Inside the Buddhist temple grounds
After our bellies were filled, we headed to the bamboo forest. It was quite busy but still enjoyable and I would advise to keep walking until you reach the end. Many people just tended to mill at the beginning of the walking path. We spent a nice time then walking through the adjoining park and made our way to the Togetsu-kyo Bridge. I can only imagine how beautiful this area would look in autumn or in spring. There were so many people enjoying the waterway on row boats and walking along the paths.
We found ourselves some ice cream near the lake chatting before sticking our heads into some stores near the station. After this, we headed back into the city and parted ways.
At night, I joined a walking tour that I had found on airbnb experiences. We spent about 2 hours walking in the Gion district learning about the world of Geisha’s and the many mainstream cultural misconceptions (apparently Memoirs of a Geisha is extremely inaccurate!). The Gion district is so beautiful and much more peaceful at night and it was nice to be able to learn more information from a local not only about the Gion area but also about shrines and daily life in Kyoto and Japan in general.
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