Category Archives: Hiroshima 2011/12

Kyoto: Fushimi Inari

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Fushimi Inari Taisha is the main shrine of Inari, the Japanese god of fertility, rice, agriculture, industry and worldly success and located in Kyoto on the foot of Mt. Inari. The shrine is very famous for its trails across the mountain, which are mostly covered with countless Torii gates (each donated by a Japanese business) and dotted with many small shrines on the sides. While most people go there in the daytime, Yannik and I decided to visit the shrine in the late evening, to get a special experience that not many people see in person.

Getting there was no problem, as there was a train station nearby and we only needed to walk for 10 minutes from there to reach the main shrine building. But walking the sparsely lit ways up the hill with only few maps in between was a really interesting experience. To me, the area was so full of underlying spirituality that I couldn’t help but marvel at all the things to see.

I hope you can catch a glimpse of that feeling by watching the pictures below – enjoy! :)

Weirdness in Kyoto

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Despite beeing usually seen as the cultural heart of Japan and beeing dotted with temples and shrines everywhere even Kyoto has some spots, which may seem a bit weird from a foreigner’s perspective. At least they do from mine ;)

Kyoto in late December

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Kyoto is one of the most famous tourist locations in Japan, if not the most famous. Japanese as well as foreign visitors go there every year in huge numbers to get a glimpse of what is often considered to be the cultural heart of Japan, where a lot of the old traditions and atmosphere is still alive and preserved. Needless to say that I had to go there as well and I finally got around to doing it just about two weeks ago together with a friend who is studying in Osaka right now, as well as meeting up with two Japanese friends :)

The pictures below are a general overview of our trip and I’ve added descriptions to all of them, to tell the story of these 3 days I spent there. Still, there are a few things that I want to highlight a bit more, so they’ll be getting their own articles one of these days – so stay tuned and pay a few more visits!

 

Creating Space

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What do you do when you’re a train operator and need more space in your trains for all the rush hour passengers? Operate more trains? No, just use those, where you can simply move some of the seats upwards to create more standing space and usable doors! Quite clever indeed :o

International Cooking Class

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It’s already a bit late, but I still wanted to share a few pictures from the International Cooking Class in Higashi Hiroshima. It’s beeing held two times every month with different people from different countries introducing dishes from their homecountry to the participants. In December a friend and I took the chance to teach some German dishes, which were appropriate for the wintertime  and really had a blast with all these nice Japanese women, who were really eager to learn a lot about our cooking and Germany. So please follow the link below for some pictures and also contact me for the recipes if you’re interested :)

Photo Album