Even before arriving in Japan we heard that Kyoto was perhaps the most attractive city in the country. It is a cute town where visitors can find anything they wish for in terms of culture and tradition.

Within just a few hours we were fully immersed in all the aspects of Japan that you hear about.

Our cultural immersion started in the place where we spent our nights in Kyoto

To start with we stayed in a Japanese-style traditional house, known as Ryokan. More than that, we were in an old-style Kyoto Machiya townhouse. We were kindly invited to stay at Luck You guesthouse while we were in Kyoto, and the experience couldn’t have been more pleasant and satisfying.

We’ll go into more detail about our experience at this extraordinary townhouse in a separate post, to make sure we do it justice.

At night, we were given free tickets to a traditional public bath located just in front of Luck You.

This experience was completely different from anything we would have expected in Japan, but the time we spent there was very interesting. In those public bath houses, called Sentō, they separate men and women because you can’t wear any clothes while bathing in any of the pools. For that reason Ruth went to one side while Noah and I went to the other.

For obvious reasons we couldn’t take any pictures of the pool, but at least we could from the entrance :). The difficult thing for me was making sure Noah knew that he couldn’t dive in the pools :). As he was learning and improving his swimming skills, he was obviously anxious to go to a pool again to dive and swim.

There were a few different types of pool, such as for relaxation, with cold water, with hot water, etc. We tried them all, but after a short while we had to leave because Noah was not enjoying being in a pool where he couldn’t swim or dive :).

Starting to explore Kyoto and its temples and shrines

One thing that is certainly not lacking in Kyoto is shrines and temples. They are spread all over the city and visitors normally have a hard time choosing the nice ones, as they are all nice!

We started by the shrine we thought was the most important one – the Fushini-inari-taisha Shrine.

Family Travel Secret

The Fushini-inari-taisha Shrineis an interesting shrine as it has more than 10.000 orange torii gates.

The walk is very pleasant as it is in the middle of a forested area, so the air feels fresher and you feel connected with nature.

There was a point when Ruth stayed behind taking pictures while Noah and I continued to explore the shrine. After a while we met up again, but this time I left Noah with Ruth while I went to the top of mount Inari, where there was Yotsutsuji intersection. I honestly thought that on the top pf the mountain we would get at least a partial view of the surrounding area at the bottom of the mount, which was not the case. It was still a nice walk though.

We spent more time than we expected at the Fushimi Inari Shrine, so now we only had a few hours until all the temples and shrines would close for the day.

We took the bus for a few stops until we reached Chishakuin Temple. There we just walked around a bit, enjoying the sculptures and the main temple.

From there we went to Sanjusangen-do Temple. This time Noah and Ruth entered the temple while I waited for them.

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The main hall of the temple you will find the three meter tall Kannon Bodhisattva with 1000 gold statues of 163 centimeters.

As it was already nearly 4:30pm we stopped visiting temples and went to Maruyama Park. This is a beautiful park with a nice gate and is very pleasant to walk around. Spring should be amazing with all the cherry trees full of blossom and colors. If we had been there just a few weeks later, we’d probably have seen the trees with a different autumn color, but it was still very nice.

Last stop was the famous Higashiyama District. This is a place where the houses and the whole environment are in the style of traditional olden-days Japan. It was already night, with a beautiful full moon, so the scenery couldn’t have been more perfect. The pictures speak for themselves …

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Yasaka Pagoda has 46 meters tall in the Hokan-ji Temple.

At this point Noah was very tired and started to get cranky. That’s when we realized that it was time to start heading back to our guest house, but on the way we stopped for dinner in a small restaurant called Creperie Garcon, serving crepes. They were delicious.

With all 3 of us fully fed, we returned to Luck You. Noah was extreeeeeeemely tired, and we were a bit too, so it didn’t take long for us to fall asleep.

It was good to sleep early as we had an early morning trip to Hiroshima the next day.