2nd January 2015, Friday
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| View outside Hotel Room |
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| Breakfast |
Today, we woke up abit late and luckily, the snow had stopped, and everywhere was covered with snow. We got ready and went downstairs to have our breakfast. The breakfast buffet was with simple dishes, not much food. We took our time to have our breakfast and then we left around 9 plus. Then we took the JR line to
Fushimi Inari Shrine. We had to take the JR line back to Kyoto station and then changed to the Nara line, roughly 3 stops away. The train was packed with people, and when we alighted at Inari station, it was crowded with people. It was so crowded until we can't really walk out of the station. Slowly, we made our way to the shrine, there were a lot of food stalls before the shrine. There were snow around and the ground was also very wet. For this shrine, there were 2 fox statues standing in front of the shrine (where the foxes were the messengers of the God of Rice). And here, the famous attraction was the vermilion
torii gates and there was thousand of the gates. After we paid respect in the main shrine and we went walking through the torii gates. It was a long way and it covered the whole round of Mount Inari, it took us about 2 hours to climb to the top.
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| Fox statue covered with snow |
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| Tojii Gates |
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| The two dense rows of torii gates of Senbon Torii |
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| View from Yotsutsuji intersection |
We had to climb a lot of steps while walking through the many red gates, at a point, the gates were divided into 2 ways, where you can choose to go left or right. We just followed the crowd and continued walking, took some of the snow up to play along the way too...hehehe....And when i turned around to see the gates, there were words engraved in each gate. Along the way, there were other smaller shrines too where there were many people paid respect too. At half way of the route, we reached the Yotsutsuji intersection where we saw the view of whole Kyoto. We just stood there and watched the view for a few minutes, we had to left too as there were many people around. Then we continued climbing up the steps to the top and finally we reached on the top. There was a shrine on the top, and there was a very small sign at the side where it indicated we reached the top of Mount Inari. There were also candles and food offerings to pay respect for the foxes. My friend thought the food were to buy to own to eat, not for the foxes. We queued up to pay respects to the shrine, and then we walked down on the other round. But the more we climbed down, there were ice on the steps which we cannot walk down due to our rubber shoes and there were no dry steps for us to walk down too. So we had to walk back the same way how we climbed up as there were more dry steps. If not, it should be going up from one way and down the other way to complete the whole round.
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| High Steam Pressure to roast the chestnuts |
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| Hot Chocolate Drinks |
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| Snowing outside the station |
Going down the steps was much easy than going up...hahaha...We bought an ice cream too and the staff gave us a fortune paper which was of course, in Japanese. We asked the staff whether is it good, then she said it was good, so we took the paper home. Then we stood there to look at the view while eating the ice cream. After that, we walked down to the food stalls. There were still many people there, cannot even walk in opposite direction. So we just walked and see what nice foods were being sold around, there were games stalls too. There was a stall selling roasted chestnuts too and they used very high pressure to cook it. We got 1 bag to try, it was not bad...Then we also got a small hot drink called Kocha, sweet and refreshing. And then we walked slowly to the train station, it was already packed with people. The staffs don't allow passengers to go into the train platforms before the train arrived. We reached back to Kyoto station at about 3 plus and then we walked in the station. Then we went into a small cafe to have some hot chocolate drinks and played with their wifi...hehehe...After staying some time in the cafe, we noticed that it has started to snow outside. Then we went outside and started to enjoy ourselves in the snow...hahaha...
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| Big Apples |
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| Snow Crab..Very sweet!! |
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| Tuna & Salmon Sashimi..Nice!! |
After playing for some time, we went into Istean basement to see what to buy for dinner. And we saw snow crabs, fresh tuna and fresh salmon, etc and all looked yummy! And of course, we bought a snow crabs, a packet of tuna and salmon sashimi and a very big apple (which the apple ended up back in Singapore..hohoho). And i also bought 2 cooked chicken wings too...hehehe...After shopping for all the food, we made our way back to our hotel to eat our food. We even boiled the eggs (stole back last night) to eat...hehehe... And the snow got heavier and the wind got stronger, more fierce than last night. Luckily we came back early today. After the nice dinner, i went to have a nice hot bath again...hehhee...Tomorrow is another long day.
Hotel Stayed:
Hotel Tetora Otsu
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