Pictures from Kyoto

This weekend was a long weekend in Japan thanks to some sort of public holiday or another, so Soph and I headed off to Kyoto in search of culture and coffee (respectively). Despite the massive holiday crowds I'm happy to report the venture was a success, we visited two big buddihist temples, wandered down winding alleys packed with people and cool little japanese shops, saw numerous geisha being ferried about in rickshaws and found and awesome cafe that served great coffee.

Oh, and I took heaps of photo's, here are a few of them....




This is Kiyomizu Temple and it was packed full of people when we were there. It seems that long weekends are a popular time to visit the temple and pray for good luck and what have you. But it's also a really popular sightseeing spot, resulting in a chaotic mix of tourism and spirituality thats quite a sight to behold.




A nice elderly couple offered to take this photo, so we let them. They asked us if we were Italian and when we said we were from Australia the lady was sooooo impressed she shook my hand.




Sometimes when I take photos I like to see just how much "Japan" I can fit in one shot. I'm pretty happy with the result here.




Oh yeah, Autumn in Kyoto is kinda a big deal and people love to take photos of the colourful foilage. I saw one guy rip through almost an entire role of film on just one tree, I mean come on... just get a digital camera already.




Yeah, so... this is a tower, it's in Kyoto above a hotel.... That's pretty much it.

The Photo Edition

We've had a big week, as it was our first week actually teaching students. It went pretty well. It's quite scary, but we're getting the hang of it.

Today we organised to have internet connected at our flat. It won't happen for a month, though. Once it does things should get more interesting around here... Who knows, maybe Clinton will even post!

Anyway, here are some photos, largely pertaining to the first post...

Clinton playing shamisen

Samurai!

Spiderzilla!
(Unfortunately, the council came and trimmed the bushes, so Spiderzilla is no more.)

Clinton and 280 yen yakitori (mmmmm, tasty)

Hmmm....

(We saw this in Amerkiamura, a place I shall have to go into great detail about later.)

I'd like to conclude by apologising for the formatting of this post. The blogspot editor is crummy.