Today we took the train to Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine. The mountain home of the Fox Gods the Gods of rice. It was pretty amazing. There is a large shrine there and a trail to the top of the mountain. The trail is covered with thousands of tori gates overhead. It’s hard to describe. Along the way there are little shrines you can look at. It has been hot and extremely humid all week. Some days better than others. Today was the worst I think, and Ricky and I weren’t up for climbing to the top of the mountain, so we went up a little ways and left. If we have looked a little sweaty, sunburned, and grungy in some of these pics, now you know why. While we were at the main shrine there was a Shinto ceremony going on. We couldn’t take pictures, but Ricky was able to record the music. It was a drum, old type flute, and a string instrument that was strummed. I don’t know the name. It was not like our western music and hypnotic and beautiful.

Ricky had told me about how some people ate grilled sparrow here. I had seen a guy grilling something, but Ricky recognized what it was. I really thought he would try some and I would have grabbed a bite with him, but the thing still had it’s eyes, head, and beak. We couldn’t handle that. YUK!!

We left Inari to go to Nara, but were sidetracked when someone gave us bad information. Turns out there was some kind of wreck on the line we went on and we were diverted to a different line that our Japan Rail passes do not work on. So we decided to go back to Yugi. Who wanted to see the largest Buddha in the world anyway?

Yugi was a very quaint town from what we could see and it had an amazing large temple. Lots of old curvy roofs and that kinda thing. I’ll let the pictures do the talking. It was so so hot there.

We left Yugi and headed back to Kyoto. It was raining when we got there and we had to run through the rain with a zillion pound of luggage. As I type this, Ricky and I are on a Shinkansen bullet train. Ricky tells me we are going 186mph, and these aren’t even the fastest ones. It’s pretty amazing. The slight sway of the train makes me very sleepy, Ricky’s psychoanalysis said it has something to do with me getting rocked as a baby. Maybe so. We get to Tokyo around 8:45pm. We had hoped to meet up with Eishi earlier, but our sightseeing got in the way. I just talked to him on the phone and he is meeting us at the hotel. We’ll get in a few sights tonight, but Ricky and I need a shower.