The time to visit Japan is not in summer. Trust me on this.
Kyoto during this year in Japan for me have been 30+ degrees Celsius from early June, and July and August stayed at a steady 35-38 degrees throughout. Plus humidity on top of that.
I haven’t minded the rain. I do like rain. The typhoons are a bit extreme though.
So as spring melted into summer, my sightseeing went from some (because settling takes time) to none in fairly short order. But I did get out for one thing in June.
Nijo castle in central Kyoto.
I could go look up all kinds of facts about this castle, but I didn’t learn them at the time, and didn’t need them to enjoy visiting it.
After getting inside and passing through a couple of walls, there is a big old building. Gorgeous really and inside are even more gorgeous things: wall paintings.
While Europe went more of paintings, Japan painted on their walls and on screens (and door screens). More gold meant richer, but they also went for white with ink, more in the style of Chinese ink drawing, although Japan developed some of their own techniques too in that area.
Although the inside was absolutely gorgeous and most everything was reproductions, we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Sorry, but you can probably find pictures online of what they would be like.
Some with flowers, made to different seasons. One had tigers. Those are just a couple I could remember of the top of my head.
Outside this main building were beautiful gardens and some ruins of older structures. There was also a big building under renovation that I have no idea what it looked like.
Since I’m more of a garden/park person when it comes to sightseeing, I truly enjoyed this part and had many pretty pictures, making it hard to only pick a couple.
To cap of my visit, about thirty minutes before closing and when I was just about to leave. It started pouring, like seriously pouring rain. Thankfully I happened to be inside the gift shop at the time.
Luckily for me, it slackened off about twenty minutes later so I didn’t have to bike for 20 minutes in pouring rain.
