Kyoto Gosho (a.k.a. Kyoto Imperial Palace)

On my third day in Kyoto, I set off bright and early to go see the Imperial Palace. I'd looked it up on the web before I even came to Japan, and turns out the Gosho is only open to visitors on a guided tour, which you must sign up for in advance (especially if you want to go on an English one.) So I'd done that, and being the go-getter that I am, I'd picked an early time--I think like 9 or 10 AM. I took the subway for the first time to get here, depending once again on my guidebook, and this worked fairly well, although I am far fonder of Tokyo's system. However, when I emerged from the subway station, I went the exact opposite direction that the Gosho was actually in. This happens fairly often to me. Luckily, I enjoy walking and I always come early. In the end, I did figure out that I was going the wrong direction, and got myself turned back around.

When I finally arrived at the Gosho, which was set in the middle of a vast park (open to the public) I had to show my passport to some official looking gentlemen at the gate, and was permitted inside, where I was directed to a small building with a gift shop, where the tour began. Luckily, we were allowed to take pictures and all that good stuff.

Now, the Gosho is basically a huge park with a lot of buildings in it. These buildings are all fairly well maintained--freshly painted, and fairly recently built, but I thought it would be interesting to see. It was all so well maintained--it was almost as if they were expecting the emperor to drop in some time soon. A little odd. The buildings themselves were all pretty standard, if impressively numerous.

It was definitely interesting to see traditional imperial residential architecture, after all the temples I'd been seeing lately. It was all very open. I imagine the emperor almost never got any privacy. That was a problem with Japan in general, though, at least in older times.

Art history geek! Actually, I love this picture because it demonstrates how the Japanese took a simple, utilitarian thing--the support for a roof--and made it into this beautiful, unnecessarily elaborated thing. Despite the heaviness of the roof for a large building, a lot of that is just for show, not practicality.

The gardens were one of my favorite things, at least in terms of getting good pictures! Although it seems like I was wandering through some kind of floral paradise, in reality we all stood in one corner and took pictures like crazy people. I'm sure there are at least 10 other people from my tour with the exact same shot. Since we weren't actually allowed in the garden, there were no annoying people getting in the shot! Yay! I guess...

A beautiful, picturesque bridge we weren't allowed to walk on. The emperor was one lucky bastard, right? As you can kind of see from the pictures here, I got incredibly lucky with the weather, particularly on this day--the skies were ridiculously blue, but it was probably just about 70 degrees--so not too hot at all. Everything was absolutely bathed in sunlight, and it was just gorgeous.

After we finished up with the tour, they took us back to the gift shop and I bought a cute keitai strap with a picture of a Heian-era lady in the classical style. Very cute. After I left, I was feeling pretty hungry, so I went to a nearby Freshness Burger. Freshness Burger is a slightly upper-level fast food restaurant (e.g. the Baja Fresh to Mos Burger's Mcdonald's or something), and really quite delicious. I also got out my map and started pouring over it--trying to decide which sight to go to see next. Luckily, you can get these absolutely brilliant bus maps in Kyoto, which tell you exactly what bus to take to get to which sight. So, for example, if you were at the Imperial Palace, as I was, it would tell you how to get to Ginkakuji, for example. It also told you how to get to places from various transportation hubs, like Kyoto Station or other big subway stations. So incredibly useful. It also had a big map on the back, which had the exact route of every single bus in the city. That way you could figure out how close you were to your stop, which eliminated a lot of the uncertainty, if you couldn't see or hear anything about the stops in English.