June 12, 2012

Taste of Japan: Day 08

We took advantage of our stay in Kyoto and woke up early this morning. Destination: Fushimi Inari Shrine. This shrine is famous for the thousands of torii gates located in the back. These torii gates line up and form a trail up Mt. Inari. The torii gates are purchased and donated by individuals and companies, and their name and date of the donation is carved into the side.

The whole trail takes almost 3 hours to walk, but due to our time limitations, we were only about to walk about 45 minutes. We read that the first look out point is this far up, so we wanted to at least make it to that point. The walk itself is calming; surrounded by the torii gates and also the lush greenery. If we had more time, we would have made an effort to walk up to the end.

After Inari, we made our way back to our hotel to pack up and check out. We had lunch and got back on the bullet train to head back to Tokyo. We arrived late afternoon and did some packing before heading back out into the city. Our friends who left earlier in the day recommended a stand up sushi bar inside the subway station at our hotel. We went to try it out as a snack and had one of the best pieces of sushi I've ever had! It was a slightly charred salmon sushi; a piece of salmon on the rice roll, topped with mayo and at the end, the chef would use a blow torch to cook the salmon to about 70%. Everything literally melted in my mouth! 

After our snack (which turned out to be dinner because we were full afterwards), we made our final trek to Shibuya and walked around one last time :(

No comments:

Post a Comment