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Inari Shrine
The next day, we started early for the Inari Shrine, one of Kyoto’s most famous sites. It’s free, and the day we went, it was warm and sunny, which was perfect for walking up the hundreds of stairs through bright orange gates to the summit and back, which took us about 2 hours, including stopping […]
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Tenryu-ji Temple
After a restful and peaceful night at Shunkō-in Temple, we had breakfast in the most adorable restaurant in the world. It’s a small place, painted green and with only five tables, but it’s almost entirely decorated with toy frogs! The elderly woman behind the counter spoke a little English, and brought us huge slabs of […]
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Kyoto
One of the first things we did after we arrived in Kyoto was to walk to Nijō Castle, about a half hour from our hotel. We went inside the Ninomaru Palace, where we saw these beautiful paintings on the walls of the different rooms, including tigers, leopards, birds, bamboo and peonies. Most of the sparse […]
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Kanazawa Day Two
Many of Kanazawa’s key sites are clustered in one area. We started with Kenrokuen Garden, described as one of the three most beautiful landscape gardens in Japan. Built and expanded over two centuries by the ruling Maeda family as a private garden, it was opened to the public in 1871. We’re so glad it was. […]
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Kanazawa
We arrived in Kanazawa, on Japan’s west coast, around noon and walked immediately to a local vegan restaurant called Los Angeles, where the food including teriyaki soy chicken, ginger soy steak, salad and three slices of vegan chocolate cake were pure heaven. We kept walking after lunch, this time to visit Kurando Terashima’s House, a […]
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Kiso Valley
After a hurried breakfast at the Starbucks in Nagano station, we hopped on a Limited Express (read, slow, i.e., not a Shinkansen) train to Nakatsugawa, which took 2 hours to travel the 211km. Nice thing about it, though, was the huge windows, so we could get a good view of the landscape along the way. […]
