May 20

This day was my favorite day in Kyoto. We started by visiting a museum. The grounds of this museum had a pretty garden on it. We then went to Kiyomizudera and it was amazing! There was a little bit of an incline and some steps as we walked, but nothing we weren’t used to. I was so in love with the view, I didn’t even mind the huge crowd that was there. Eventually some classmates and I saw snow cones and decided to get some. They were bigger than we thought and were a good price.


After this, we went to to Gion to shop around-there were so many shops so I definitely will be coming back here! It was hard to see because of all the people, but the buildings are the ones I always see in pictures when I Google Kyoto. They are traditional type buildings, which is so cool. I also noticed a lot of Japanese women wearing kimonos, as
well as some men. We went to Yasaka Shrine, and our last stop was Shijo Kawaramachi. Originally, a couple of us girls were going to rent kimonos to wear. By the time we came around to doing that, it was around 4:00, and that’s the time most rentals would be up (if it were a day rental). We ended up finding a used kimono shop that was selling kimonos for as low as 1,100 yen, which is a complete steal. We bought them and the women working in the shop put them on us the proper way, so we were all so happy.


Something I did notice was that most of the people wearing kimonos were Japanese people. Ava was a little hesitant to wear them at first because of that, but I do remember reading somewhere that Japanese people love when foreigners wear kimonos. I’m so glad we all made the choice to wear them because we got a lot of attention from Japanese people. They really loved that we were wearing them. This is yet another way I got to witness the intersection of tradition and modernity, is with kimonos still being worn to this day, and foreigners taking part in them. These two ladies who weren’t much older than us came up to us and talked to us for 10 minutes- she was so sweet! To end this night, we took a bus to the area our hotel was in and got Indian food on the walk from the bus stop. Such a fun day!



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