No matter where you are or what time you are reading this at, by Japanese time I am now 19 years old! Here is a full, comprehensive list of everything I can now do in Japan legally that I couldn’t yesterday;

• Nothing

That’s right. For the Japanese all the fun starts at 20.

As far as partying goes, I’m going to have to pass, really. I consider my journey to Kyoto my party! I’m pretty broke right now and can’t really afford to live it large, so Matt and I are going for a little meal tomorrow, then going for a slightly larger party on the 30th, as the day after is Matt’s party. It’s tough to celebrate when you’re flat broke!

I have decided to remove the gallery, as it has photos of my students as well as my friends, and it’s not really fair to just show everyone photos of them, and I can’t be bothered to get permission from them all. My best photos can be found here , via the “Photography” link.

I wanted to find a list of interesting people who were born or who died on the 29th of March, or find some fun things that happened. But apparently the 29th of March is the most boring day of the entire year, because not a single interesting thing has happened on it. Except my birthday, which has happened 19 years in a row!

Thanks again to everyone for the support you’ve all shown this blog and me through it. It keeps me coming back and writing knowing that my friends, family and, for some reason, two people living in remote Russia come back to read this thing every so often! My promise as a 19 year old is to write more updates! So check back soon!

- Mike

I don’t think I can justify writing another two long updates about Kyoto without driving whoever is left reading this blog insane, so instead I’m going to merge the second part of the 20th with the 21st into one glorious account.

Tuesday 20th March

Having left the gardens behind us, we made our way towards the mighty golden temple, stopping on the way only once to eat some rather excellent vending machine ice-cream. That’s something I need to write an update about – the Japanese vending machines. Watch this space.

Before we got there, however, we got hopelessly sidetracked into yet another temple. I won’t go on and on about it, but what I will go on and on about is the Zen Gardens that were inside a couple of these temples. I have collected a few of my favourite photos of these stone gardens, so I can show you the pictures now and get them out of my system. Here we go.

They were awesome, and as my travelling companion said, what you see is not the original work of art, but the art the monk who raked it this morning created. It’s kind of cool to think it’ll never quite look like that again. Beat that, Mona Lisa.

Well, I’ve tried to put it off for as long as I possibly can, but we finally arrived at the golden temple. I’m going to give up on trying to justify this thing in words. Click on a few of the pictures and you’ll see why. Go on, click them now. Why are you still reading this?!

What can I say? Tourist trap or not, this thing is simply unbelivable. That’s a phoenix on top of there, although I think this thing has been around a little longer than Harry Potter, before you ask.

Anyway, after that it was time to head back to the hostel, via a very exciting bus ride, made exciting by the fact that we had no idea if we were ever going to make it home or were even heading in the right direction. It all turned out OK in the end, however, otherwise how would you be reading this? Afterwards we invited a load of the people staying at the hostel out for Chinese food, and in the end yet another amazing plan was formed between myself and Miss. Mari from Nagoya, who was a Kyoto pro, to visit the final few temples of my visit.

Wednesday 21st March

I had been told countless times that before I left, I had to visit Ginkakuji, the silver temple, which is not really silver at all but made of wood. Once I was told it had wonderful gardens and a zen garden too, I was pretty set on it anyway. So off we went!

Well, off we would have gone if it wasn’t for the fact that everyone living in Japan had been joined by everyone who has ever lived in Japan in the queue for the bus. So the day started off with us being deafened by some random Japanese singer who had the amazing chance to play live at Kyoto station to exactly zero people. Eventually, however, we climbed on the number 30 and headed towards the silver temple.

Tadaa! How awesome is that? The temple itself is pretty normal, but it’s gardens totally make it worth the trip. There were, sadly, an awful lot of tourists who were kind enough to helpfully stand in all of my photos, no matter how hard I tried to get rid of them.

That done, we decided to walk down the Philosopher’s Path, a famous short walk that follows a small river as it heads through Kyoto, stopping off at some of the little temples along the way. I honestly can’t remember what order these various temples were encountered in, so bear with me on this one. Here’s a couple photos from our walk.

So that just about finishes up my trip to Kyoto. A four hour train ride later, and I was back in Tokyo, thinking about where I wanted to go next. Finally, I’ve had some comments that the way photos are currently displayed on this blog is kind of annoying, having to click and then wait for each one to load. I’m looking into a different way to display them and will try to get that out soon.

Oh, and I am so going back to Kyoto in the summer!

Tuesday 20th March
Very late on Monday 19th, a plan was formed by myself and Johnny, an Asian studies student on a holiday from South Korea, at the K’s House hostel in Kyoto. Instead of disappearing off to different parts of the city, we would instead join forces to form a traveling duo more powerful than any this world has ever seen before! What followed on from this alliance of titans can only be described as an epic quest. Or possibly a day long trip around some great temples and shrines in Kyoto. Either will do.

We set off at a reasonably good time considering how late everyone had been drinking, hopped on a train and headed north-east of the centre of the city, towards what is probably the most famous landmark in Kyoto – Kinkakuji. The golden temple.

However, that was quite some walk from where we left the train and there was plenty of exciting things to see on the way. Itching to snap some photos in the brief sunlight, we headed for the first shrine we could find. It turned out that prolonging the wait for Kinkakuji paid off. What we stumbled upon was a small shrine with a small, but amazingly crafted garden. What made this place so remarkable was that, in prime tourist season, it was totally and utterly empty. Not like the graveyard from yesterday’s post, with a few people here and there. Not even like a cinema when it’s showing a Ben Stiller movie. No, totally and utterly 100% empty.

Moreover, it was totally silent too. Even three days into my stay my ears were still ringing from the eternal 100 greatest roadwork sound effects CD on loop that someone insists on playing outside my flat at 3am. It was nice to just stand on the island in the middle of the lake and hear nothing. I’d almost forgotten how that sounded.

Eventually we tore ourselves away from the silent garden and headed to Ryoan-ji, a temple and shrine complex, not too far from Kinkakuji. Basically, once you step inside it, everything you can see for the next hour or two demands you take a picture of it. You know what that means…

It means I took a whole load of photos! Hurrah! Bear in mind that what we’re currently looking at is just the first part of the temple complex itself. We’ve hardly even got to the meat of it, yet.

It really was a stunning place. Every single building and construction, from the tallest temple to the smallest statue, were beautifully hand crafted, and surrounded by perfectly maintained gardens, with immaculately trimmed hedgerows and trees so symmetrical birds became confused trying to land on them and had to make emergency stops at nearby airports.

I lost count of the number of times I said “We just don’t have this sort of thing in England”. Sad but true I’m afraid. I’ve never seen a hedgerow that flat before. Or a river that quiet. My theory is that I actually walked in and was immediately drugged then shown a video whilst I was stumbling about in a haze. If I never update after this, I’ve been got by the Kyoto temple mob. Avenge my death.

Sadly this update is becoming far too wordy and I haven’t even got onto the most spectacular (albeit predictable) moment of the trip, so I’ll stop now with three final photos. They’re all black and white, to end this update on a classy note. As ever, all photos are in the gallery!

As you can see, I’ve launched the newest version of my blog. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and I think I prefer this version. It still needs a few changes to be complete, but I’m working on it! If you can’t see the new version and don’t know what I’m talking about, try refreshing the page.

If you spot any problems with it, please comment on this post and let me know. I’m working as hard as I can to iron any out before people can spot them, though! If you have any thoughts, let me hear them too!

I’ll try to get the third Kyoto post up tomorrow. I have four in total planned, and heaven knows what I’ll post after that. At the moment I am totally and utterly broke and therefore cannot afford to have fun. As everyone knows, money is the root of all joy…

Aside from that, thanks for sticking at it while I’ve been messing around with this thing recently. Lots of fun updates to appear in the very near future!

Monday 19th March
Kyoto is battered by tourists even more than Tokyo is. Although there aren’t as many visitors there at one time, it’s much, much smaller, so the density is a lot higher, I think, I was never that great at maths. Anyway, determined not to be a tourist and just see everything that everyone else has taken a million photos of and written a million books about, I decided to leave the guidebook at home for one day, hop on my bike, and go where the wind decided to take me.

I quickly abandoned the wind plan as it would have quite quickly taken me into the large river that meanders through Kyoto, so instead I just kept taking random turns and exploring whatever looked exciting as a result. Whilst I couldn’t totally escape from the other visitors, I found a few places that were virtually abandoned, something almost totally unheard of at this time of year.

The first thing I found was a tiny little shrine which was absolutely empty, just off a small street near the centre of the town. Dwarfed both in size and importance by larger nearby shrines, this place lacked the tourist information booth and ice-cream vending machine that others offer. I’m guessing that Haagen-Daaz cookie crunch ice-cream is not a traditional food of Japan, so I was glad I’d finally found somewhere that had held onto it’s identity so well.

The third picture of this set shows an Omikuji (fortune slip). People tie these to either fences (if they are there to hold them) or tree branches. Seeing a huge tree covered in these blowing in the wind is a powerful image, when you consider that every single one was tied on by someone wishing for something.

After I left the shrine, I continued on my merry way down the main road, turning off at some random little side street. I was hoping to find some utterly secret, minute little temple that I could explore on my own. What I found instead was a huge Buddist temple with a huge garden and a car park. Normally my “tourist honeypot” alarm would have gone off so loud people nearby would hear it, but this place seemed totally abandoned, bar from a few Japanese holiday makers.

What really made this place stand out, however, was the graveyard behind it. Totally open to the public, I decided to head over and have a look. In the entire graveyard, in the middle of one of the most tourist friendly cities in the world, were about three people. I was overjoyed and went into camera overdrive, determined to catch a photo that did justice to this awesome spectacle.

Well, I tried anyway. You can’t really see from these photos, but this was only a tiny part of the entire thing. It was huge, and I know if I ever head back to Kyoto, I’ll waste all my time trying to find this place…

Anyway, that’s my story for my second day in Kyoto. I spent the rest of the day viewing the city by bike, not really stopping, just covering a lot of miles, before heading back to the hostel and collapsing in a heap. Little did I know that I’d hardly begun to see anything amazing…