Arriving in Kyoto

Fujihara-san safely delivered us to the train station in Nagiso, where we hopped a train for Nagoya. In Nagoya, we caught a Shinkansen bullet train for the 90 minute trip to Kyoto. This time we sprung for reserved seats, since the last time we rode a bullet train we had to stand in the aisles for over an hour.

We arrived in Kyoto to find that everyone in Japan had planned a trip to Kyoto at the same time we had. As it turns out, we had landed in Kyoto smack dab in the middle of the Gion Matsuri festival. This festival is one of Japan's most famous (and most crowded), dating back to the 9th century. The highlight of the festival is a parade of large wheeled floats on July 17th.

Our hotel happens to be in Gion, at the epicenter of the festival. For our first night in Kyoto, we decided to embrace the festivities by eating street food, shoulder to shoulder with throngs of Japanese, and then to walk the main thoroughfare at dusk (pictured above). Although there were easily 200,000 people in the crowd, this was definitely a Japanese-style mob. People moved in an orderly fashion, east on one side of the cones in the middle of the street and west on the other. Friendly police officers directed traffic and took pictures for people. It was a very different feel than, say, the Portland Rose Festival.