I will do my best to summarize the last 48 hours. We spent half a day in Kanazawa. After about 24 hours in Kanazawa, we felt that we had seen all that there was to see in Kanazawa. Then we left Kanazawa and went to Kyoto. There, we were mesmerized by the beauty of the city, the friendliness of Japanese people and just how many tourists can fit in one city (It's way more tourists than we saw during Golden Week).

Check out an interactive Map of the places we visited here. I will update this map as we continue our Journey. This post is about Day 11 and 12.

I will split this entry in two sections: The rest of our Kanazawa-Trip and the beginning of our time in Kyoto.

Kanazawa

We got up semi-early to see the Geisha-District that was just around the corner of our Airbnb. It was not crowded at all on a Monday morning at 9 AM and we felt as if we had the streets to ourselves. The following three pictures should show that vibe.

Since Golden Week was finally officially over and the Post Offices were open again, we bought a lot of postage Stamps and sent out all the postcards we failed to send out in the days before. Postage is comparably cheap in Japan. To send a postcard from Japan to Germany via priority Mail, it costs only 70 ¥ which is less than 0.5 €. That is cheaper than sending a postcard within Germany!

One curious thing in Kanazawa is, that all pedestrian traffic lights have a small speaker that is mounted on a pole that extends to the side of the traffic light. All traffic lights in Japan do have speakers to signal to visually impaired people when the light is green but to see those speakers mounted to the side looked funny to me.

We also went to the Kenrokuen-Garden (it was not as amazing as all the guides were trying to sell it as) and tried very hard to find a place to eat lunch. A lot of places were closed even though they should have been open (Google Maps said so). The reason being that Golden Week was over and shop-owners were having breaks from the business.

Kyoto

We took the train to Kyoto around 3pm and reached it right before sunset. Kyoto has a grid like layout of streets and is comparably flat (even though it is surrounde by mountains on three sides), so shots like this are possible on a lot of streets.

In the evening, we went to a Okonomiyaki-Restaurant (Japanese Pancake). It was delicious! Later, we checked out the bar-scene in Kyoto.

We found one very nice place which had a live DJ that played funk records from the 60s and 70s and had a very "homey"-vibe. The place already closed at 10:30 PM and we got to talk to the DJ once all the other guests left. He recommended us a place nearby: A Jazz-Bar where you can drink a good Whisky Sour. As you can see, there was a certain chaos in this Jazz-Bar. We got to talk to a lot of interesting people and tried the Whisky Sour which was not a Whisky Sour at all. It was pretty chaotic but a lot of fun! Maybe it was even too much fun since I couldn't get out of bed on the next day. I left our hotel at around 2 PM.

The weather was fantastic. We rented bikes and went northwards. Kyoto is surrounded by mountains and the more you move away from the city-center, the more village-like Kyoto becomes and the more interesting shops and places you can see (in my opinion). We found a cute Café, had a very late breakfast and enjoyed the beautiful surroundings and weather.

I found out that eating was a good idea but this café just could not satisfy my appetite for a hearty meal. Ever since going to Japan, we wanted to go to a dedicated Gyoza-Restaurant. We found such a place easily accessible by bike in Kyoto. This place looked like it hadn't been renovated since opening around 30 years ago. The walls could tell stories, the menu was just available in Japanese (as you can see in the picture above) and the waitress/owner (?) didn't speak much English. I ordered a cheap Gyoza-Menu and was happy!

After having satisfied our hunger, we explored further on our bikes and found a very pretty shrine - Kitano Tenman-gū that was not crowded at all. The following pictures show a few impressions from that shrine. Those are wishes that you can write on wooden slates. This shrine had so many wishes that you couldn't even see the underlying structure anymore. We wanted to finish the day with a sunset shot of Kyomizu-Dera but unfortunately, it closed at 6 PM (even though I checked on Google Maps and didn't find any information on opening hours). So you just have to live with this picture of Gion (the surrounding Area of Kyomizu-Dera).