We started the day with light breakfast and then headed towards near by buddhist temples Higashi Honganji and Nishi Honganji. Both are absolutely stunning from the outside as well as from the inside. They are also less crowded than places we saw before (or maybe it was because we got there quite early).
Then we went to the main bus station to purchase the daily bus tickets. On the way there we were approached by bunch of school kids. As a part of English classes they had to ask foreigners to answer few questions like: where are you from? do you like sushi? what you are going to see in Kyoto? We were happy to help and in return we were given an origami and took a photo with them.
Our main itinerary for today was Shugakuin Imperial Villa. It’s not a very popular tourist destination mostly because of a booking process. We’ve sent a request 2 moths before our trip and luckily we were accepted! Yes, accepted - because it felt more like a job application where you have to provide lots of details about yourself and wait few days for them to get back to you! But it was definitely worth it! We had an English speaking audio guide and it all lasted approximately 80 minutes. Villa itself was built by Emperor Go-Mizunoo as his retirement residence.
Unfortunately our time in Kyoto was coming to the end and we still felt that there are many places worth seeing. Before heading back to our apartment we went to check out 2 more places:
Marumaya Park and its vicinty
And Nishiki Market, one of the places where you can find almost everything. From good food, through massive amount of normal and quirky Japanese things, up to purikura photo booth.
