Foremans' Travel: Saturday: Part I -Quake and a Gold Shrine,

April 13 - Part I - Saturday - A Quake, Gold, Heian, Kimonos, Train Station Lunch, Daigo-ji, Geisha paparazzi

"Was that your phone?!!!" "No." "What was it" "I don't know." ZZZZZZZZ

That was our reaction to the earthquake warning at 5:33 am. The sound turned out to be the room phone ringing a district and strange sound. A 6 point shake somewhere came to us in Kyoto at about 3 points on the scale. At breakfast everyone else in the group talked about feeling their beds shake. Now at least we know what the warning sounds like and we won't be blaming each other for failing to turn off our devices. That's how we start our day in Kyoto, the cultural center of Japan.

Kyoto retains that royal feeling of its 1000 years as Japan's capitol. It features 300 temples, 1,600 shrines and 3.2 million people. It's famous for silk, its Geisha traditions, architecture award winning buildings, and the 'bride class' which even our guide attended for a couple weeks. She said some prospective brides attend this demanding course for a couple months to learn how to be a good Japanese
wives and mothers -- budgeting, cooking, housekeeping, hospitality, child rearing, etc.

It's taken me a while to get these notes together because we did so much in one day. Three big ones before lunch at the train station, then two adventures after…. before we get back to our Deluxe shaky double room at the Kyoto Tokyu

Hotel.

First: We think we're about 'templed out' as we enter this morning's site, the Kinkakuji Temple, with a certain, "Oh well." Quickly it turned to, "Oh wow" when the 18 carat gold leaf pavilion opened our eyes wide. Two top stories of GOLD? Each story's architecture reflects a style: bottom floor, the military (Shogun); middle floor, the Buddhist style; and top level the meditative life. The 14th Century original structure burned in 1950 and the government rebuilt it in 1955 to the tune of millions of $. (My notes say

$30,000,000, but maybe I heard wrong.) The pictures hardly do it justice. We love watching the gardeners and sometime today we see a 600 year old Bonsai tree.

And you should have seen us 'chatting' with some eighth graders meticulously dressed in their school uniforms, but with wild expression in their footwear…crazy colors in the sneakers.