Inari Shrine (1000 Tori)

We walked through the stunning Inari Shrine, or the 1000 Tori (Tori means gate in Japanese). It was, however, a bit of a disappointment because there were so many people there and the walk was shorter than I would've liked it to be. But it was still quite the site. On the way leading up to the Shrine, there were many little shops and food stalls. Some were selling sweet potato fries, octopus balls, yakitori (chicken skewers with terriaki sauce), waffles in the shape of a fish, and squid on a stick. It was very interesting to look at all of the stalls and see how they made their food.

Day 6: Around Kyoto and cooking with Emi-san

Today the plan was to check out Inari shrine with Kris and Steve, then figure out a plan between that and enrolling in our first cooking class later in the afternoon.

Inari was great (see Abby's blog post), but the big winner was the walk up to the shrine.  We saw and sampled all of our old favourites - tacoyaki (fried octopus balls), karaage chicken (basically... KFC) and more.

For lunch, the 6 of us were craving a "kare raisu" (curry rice) so we indulged by getting our meal tickets at a vending machine and sitting down diner style at a curry shop in Kyoto station.  Hmmmm....

More to come...

Day 6: Kyoto

Today we are booting around Kyoto with Steve and Kris.  This picture was taken at Inari shrine featuring thousands of torrii (orange wooden gates).

Kyoto night scene

Girls in Kyoto

Maiko near Gion corner

Photo credit to Abby!

Day 5: Goodbye Koda-san, hello Kyoto

We said our goodbyes this morning to Koda-san, Kero-san and Miwako-chan this morning.  What a fantastic experience.  

Koda-san drove us to Ena City train station and we're heading back to Nagoya on a local train to catch another bullet train to Kyoto.

Kyoto is the ancient capital of Japan, so we are looking forward to showing the girls yet another side of this amazing country.  We are also reuniting with Steve and Kristine so that should  be fun!