First Kyoto Trip

So, my first Kyoto trip was at the beginning of the month, on September 4th, to be exact.
Of course, at the time, I was still finding my legs, as it were. In other words, I still didn't quite understand how to get around Japan very well, never having lived in a place with anything close to resembling a decent mass-transit system. 😉

Of course, it's all speculation on my part, but I think there's a few reasons why the school organized this trip. These include, among others:

1. This gave many/most of us our first experience with using the trains around here, and having a couple of the Japanese students "hold our hands" through the process was helpful, for me at least.
2. This gave us an opportunity to meet some nice and helpful Japanese students.
3. We got to see some of Kyoto, and that whet my appetite to see more, though that'll probably have to wait for a while yet, due to various factors. 😅

There's alot of pictures, most (but not all) of them with descriptions that explain the photos. Since I really don't want to duplicate that effort here, what I would suggest is checking out the gallery of photos from the trip. Some of the descriptions also have links to Wikipedia articles which give a bit more background on certain places or terms. (Edit: The pictures are up on my new Flickr gallery, but unfortunately those descriptions from my self-hosted gallery were lost. 😭)

The trip itself was fun, though we only ended up seeing a couple of places (a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine with a park), before getting some food at a local restaurant and then heading home, as it was dark and we were getting tired.

Yes, I know this is a short post and not very detailed, but trust me, there's alot of details in the descriptions of the photos for the trip. 😉 And I will try to get descriptions up for more of them as time permits.

– Stephen