This morning we board the train for the two-hour journey south form Kanazawa to Kyoto, Japan’s Imperial Capital for a millennium and now the country’s cultural and artistic capital. A true gem with more than 1,600 temples, hundreds of shrines, three imperial palaces, artful gardens, and well-preserved wooden architecture, Kyoto embodies Japan’s rich culture and complex history. The art of kabuki theatre, as well as Japanese gardens, traditional cuisine, and superb crafts thrive here, attracting legions of visitors and Japanese alike.
Now, the trains – a lot of you have seen the posts on facebook about how crowded, smushed, and crazy the train stations were – I don’t think so at all! Actually they were very organized, well run, and clean!
I was waiting in line at one of the restrooms (when isn’t there a line for women anywhere in the world!) and by accident one of the other tourists hit a red button on the wall. Almost immediately (5 seconds max!) a female police officer came over (in a very orderly run if you can ever call a run orderly) and peered into the line asking if there was a problem, was someone hurt! I was SO impressed! Even if America had a button for an emergency, we would be talking about a 20 minute wait before someone came over, and it would have been a slow crawl instead of such amazing service and assistance. Go Japan!
But, back to the trains, as you can see in the pictures below – I don’t think it was all THAT bad! Your thoughts?
Upon arrival in Kyoto we visited the currently producing pottery shop of a very ancient pottery family, Unrakugama Pottery, a family-owned pottery house producing fine handmade ceramics and earthenware.. They have been producing and training professional potters for over 125 years in this very location!
After visiting the pottery center, we then went to see the shrine of 1 million Buddhas – the Sanjusangen-do.
I really wish that we were able to take pictures inside, but we weren’t able to do this. The Buddhas were too old and they were afraid of flashes destroying more of the beautiful gold leaf and designs on each of the Buddhas. So, the best I can do is some fun pictures of me outside of the main temple and a few websites for you to see professionally allowed photos of the shrine. 
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gDDK-Fof-A]
In the temple itself there are one thousand life-size statues of the Thousand Armed Kannon which stand on both the right and left sides of the main statue of Buddha. Each statute has 100 arms for a total of 1 million hands to help lift your spirit to enlightenment / heaven.
A few websites with some amazing photography of what we saw – just breathtaking!!
Sanjūsangen-dō – on Wiki
Google Images