Fushimi Inari -- Kyoto

Last Friday Matt had off work, so we decided to take advantage of the day and go to the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto. So many people have told us it is a "must see" while living here, so we decided to check it out for ourselves.

The Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto is a Shinto shrine dedicated to Inari, the god of rice, sake, and prosperity. This shrine has 10,000 small torii gates that arch over a long path up the hill behind the shrine. Some people call it the "fox shrine" as there are many fox statues around. These fox are supposed to be the "messengers" to Inari. 

This shrine draws almost 3 million worshipers over a three day period in the Japanese New Year. So if anyone comes to visit me during the holidays, sorry, but there is no way in he-double-hockey stick I will be taking you to this shrine. Instead we can rent Memoirs of a Geisha and I will point out the scenes that were shot at Fushimi Inari.

As we say in Japan, the torii gates were sugoi (cool). There were small ones, big ones, old ones, new ones. (Maybe Dr. Seuss needs to visit this shrine!) We even got to see a few of them being replaced and painted while we were there.

Throughout the shrine grounds there were cemetery's, fox statues, prayer walls, Udon shops and fountains.

The scenery all around was beautiful, especially with the changing of the leaves.

I just love Kyoto. It is one place I could visit over and over and always find something new to see. If you ever plan on going to Japan, Kyoto is a MUST on the list.

Mt Maya in The Fall

Yesterday my neighbor and I agreed to meet some of our friends at the top of Mt Maya to give them a change of clothes and shoes. (They were doing that horrific wonderful 56k hike I did last year)  The plan was to walk to Sannomiya (about 7 km) and then take a bus to the Mt Maya Ropeway and take that up the mountain.

Everything was going as planned until we hit the ropeway. A worker told us "Wind!  Danger!" and that the ropeway was closed. I started to panic a bit as we had sandwiches, clothes and shoes to switch out at the top. After a horrible game of charades and some help from a guy who spoke great English, we discovered we were going to have to take a tram part way up and then hike it to the top. It took about 35 minutes to hike to the top, and other than the billion steps we had to climb, it was a beautiful hike. The leaves are all changing so we had some great scenery. We even commented some of the leaves on the ground were so perfect it was almost like they were purposely placed there.

While waiting for our friends, we took in the view.  Just another reminder of how beautiful of a country Japan is and how lucky I am to be living here.