So many magnificent places of worship. We’re visiting both Shrines and Temples, and many Japanese do that too. They practice Buddhism at Temples, and their Shinto faith at Shrines, having two religions at the same time.
The two religions do complement each other in a sense. With Shinto focused on the here and now, and Buddhism on the afterlife, all bases are covered!
A highlight in Kyoto today was our visit to a magnificent bamboo forest. We learned that these stalks grow taller by a foot a day until, in a month’s time, they’re about 30 feet tall. Wow!
We’ll see so many shrines and temples here, but today was all about a castle. And the scale and craftsmanship of this one are truly amazing.
Brilliant white plaster coated Himeji Castle is located between Hiroshima and Kyoto, and it’s the most visited castle in all of Japan. It has stone walls, a moat and distinctive tiered and overlapping roofs, and its origins date to 1333.
It somehow reminded me of a most elaborate frosted wedding cake.
Yes, it’s just the start of my two weeks in Japan. It’s my fourth time here, and I couldn’t wait to get back. Ahead of our tour start, three of us today explored Nakazakicho, an off-path neighborhood of Osaka with narrow lanes, wooden houses, trendy shops and galleries and tiny coffee bars and eateries. I opted for a crepe and a Matcha latte!
There could never be enough time in Paris, but I made the best of my three days!
There’s so much history here, and I saw that at the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Opera and the amazingly ‘resurrected’ Notre Dame.
But I was also amazed at the new (to me) and very modern Louis Vuitton Foundation museum for contemporary art, completed in 2016. Overlapping and floating panels of glass are suspended from a skeleton of wood and steel, and it’s absolutely spectacular. The architect Frank Gehry designed the complex, which is located in a large public park on the edge of the city, and it includes tiers of cascading outdoor terraces. His inspiration was a sailboat, and of course that resounds with me.
It was tough to part ways after six wonderful, full, beautiful days with our fun biking crew. We rode, we toured, we ate, we drank and we laughed. We were lost and found, tired and sore, scraped and bruised, and we laughed all the more.
Beyond ‘goodbye’, au revolr also means ‘til we meet again’. So au revoir and bon voyage. But also bon jour Paris; I have a 4-night stay for the finish . . .
