Japan Day 5: 1,001 Buddhas, Inari Shrine

Brief entry today. I forgot my camera for much of the day, and Wallace's pictures must be retrieved from another account on the laptop. The short story is that we walked around a lot, as Kyoto is such a pleasant place to do so. A few highlights:

Jon and I split off from the rest of the group to visit Sanjusangen-do Temple, notable for its main hall filled with 1,001 Kannon (goddess of mercy) statues. The wooden structure is the longest in the world, and the effect of all those statues, combined with crowds and the incense smoke, is overwhelming. I told Jonathan, "Dude, I feel pretty weird in here." And he replied, "Yeah, I feel like I want to get out of here." There's something hypnotic about the place.

Afterwards, we met up with Wallace and Brian at Kyoto Station, where we ate some tonkatsu. The interesting thing about the meal was we were immediately handed a mortar and pestle, and asked to grind some sesame seeds, to be combined with the tonkatsu sauce.

Then we took the train to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, which appears to be the inspiration for Christo's gates installation in New York's Central Park a couple years back. The shrine is comprised of a path lined by a seemingly infinite number of orange torii gates, which snake up a mountain. We hiked the entire path, greeted by the never-ending procession of stairs, finally reaching the top. The path is shaded by a canopy of trees, and is punctuated by a number of small restaurants and cemeteries.