Kyoto and CULTURE

A very serious toast.

The second great facet to my Kyoto adventure is that of culture. Be it through food, tradition or simply the way things are done, Kyoto's various cultural assets offer a legitimate taste of what most people outside Japan perceive the country as (was that a difficult sentence to follow?)
 In Kyoto, one doesn't have to look too hard to find traditional Japanese pastries and the like. I got to enjoy the green-tea flavored soft-cream I've been craving for a while now. Ken took the black sesame flavor. Seriously, where the hell else are you gonna find black sesame flavored soft-serve ice cream. I'm amazed.

Speaking of food, Kyoto is known to offer a very legitimate green tea. Every thirty or so meters around the outskirts of the town, one easily stumbles upon a cafe where one can enjoy the traditional tea in the way it had been prepared for centuries before today. Granted, it's not cheap (at least, not for the regular price of tea), but it is worth tasting.
 We had ours in a quaint little tea house within the grounds of the Golden Pavilion (which I went into more detail about in the HISTORY section of my Kyoto tour.) It came with a small piece of pastry topped with gold leaf. For 7$ you can EAT GOLD.

That's not a hat, it's his hair.

Food aside, Kyoto also has a number of bathhouses and ryokan inns. The former are similar to the one I visited in Kofu, whereas the latter are traditional Japanese hotels that offer a more traditional place to stay. They have the tatami straw mats and the thin futons and all that.
During our own stay, Ken and I spent a night at a lovely little ryokan run by a man who looked suspiciously like a voodoo shaman lord. Though we didn't spend much time in the place, it was quite a nice experience. Humble is a good word to describe it, I think. But I mean it in the best way.

This picture oozes of paparazzi.

And of course, I can't talk about Kyoto and culture without at least going over the geisha. Though we didn't stop to watch an actual geisha show (it was kind of pricey) we did catch a few on their way out of the geisha training school. I figure you all know what geisha are without knowing what exactly they do, so, put simply, they're entertainers. They dance or sing for rich patrons. It's a very simple way of life, I think, but one that requires somewhat of a passion for the olden ways. It was hard to get a good picture! They walk fast to avoid the gaijin paparazzi (such as myself in this case) and they tip their umbrellas low. One smiled at me and tipped her head as she walked by! It was flattering.

This picture would've been so nice if the cat had stayed.

And that was it for my culture segment! I will be updating with the last of the three parts of my Kyoto trip, NATURE, tomorrow. It was my favorite part of the visit, by the way, so be sure to check it out. It's got MONKEYS in it.
(Spoiler alert: I didn't buy one, this time around.)