Kyoto: Part 3

On Sunday we had a nice breakfast at the ryokan, and then headed out to see some more of Kyoto's temples.  We went to three temples all in a row and they are all world heritage sites.

First up was Kinkaku-ji, the golden temple.

The reflection of the temple in the lake was very pretty!

The leaves were also very pretty along the lake.  We found a few good ones to collect and bring home, keeping them safe in a book.

 Here is the temple from the back and up a hill.

 Next we went to Ryoan-ji.  The koyo here were very nice!

 This little bridge was so cute!

 This is a nice pagoda.  In Japanese pagodas are called "goju noto" for five-stacked-tower.  I think at this point we had moved to Ninna-ji temple.

 This building was much more colorful than the others.  It is too bad that the trees around it had already lost their leaves!

 Say cheese!  This tree was very red and beautiful!

 This is a very pretty flower.  I felt like I was channeling Tim's spirit taking such close up pictures of flowers :)

 We also saw one extremely confused cherry blossom tree.  I got rather excited about this since I will leave Japan before cherry blossom season really starts, so I took a lot of pictures.  We were all very surprised to see that this tree had a few flowers!

 We sat and contemplated this very large rock garden for a while.

These little stick on foot warmers saved my feet in Kyoto!  The ground was so damp and cold.  Thank you Japan for being so clever to think to stick handwarmers to the bottom of your socks!  And for selling them for cheap at every convenience store!

 At the rock garden, we also contemplated our feet.  :)

 I don't think that it gets much better than this!

 We had such a great time in Kyoto!  It was so nice to go sightseeing with a group of people, and to have Kamisaki-san and Ashizawa-san to help guide us around!