Kyoto - Exploring With Larry

for [Music] you see this all happened when I visited Kyoto Japan I took a bus tour of the city well that's what I started out to do anyway visiting Kyoto is kind of like going back into history even a thousand years ago you would have seen Beggars just like the one near the temple I spent some money to have my fortune told it was 50 Yen about 15 cents in American money I know how to use Japanese money because my dad showed me he comes to Japan a lot on business and this time he brought me with him it was summer vacation so why not anyhow there was this trained bird it went into the little house and brought me my fortune [Music] the fortune was in Japanese so I couldn't read it but I figured I could ask one of my dad's friends to translate it for me [Music] later Kyoto was the capital of Japan for about a thousand years and there are a lot of temples all over the city if you feel like it you can even ring the temple [Music] bells it's okay to do it really a lot of Japanese people take the bus tour because they like to visit places that are part of their country's history the bus [Music] you guessed it I missed it there wasn't much use going back to the hotel I just have to sit by myself my dad was at a meeting all [Music] day so I decided to see the City by myself myself I had a map with a lot of important places marked and some of my dad's friends had told me about some interesting things to see so I jumped on a street car and headed for a place just outside Kyoto it's a town called [Music] Nara some buildings in Nara are even older than the ones in Kyoto this one is called the Pagoda and it's part of a very famous [Music] temple around the Pagoda there's a park with a lot of deer roaming around some kids are afraid of them but they're really tame and friendly there was this woman selling rice crackers she could feed to the deer [Music] the Japanese call this the kasuga shrine it's used by people who belong to the Shinto religion they built the kasuga shrine about 1200 years ago when Naro was was the capital of Japan before they moved it to Kyoto of course today the capital is Tokyo you can watch the Shinto priest doing their ceremonies just about the way they did them a thousand years [Music] ago the priest is some of the ceremonies by himself but there are special nights when they light all the lanterns and hundreds of people F [Music] come back in Kyoto I found the temple kinkakuji my map showed me a big Garden near [Music] bye my dad says the Japanese consider gardening a form of [Music] art this Garden has a famous building called the gold [Music] Pavilion 600 years ago it was the Mountain Home of a Japanese General the outside is actually covered with [Music] gold the general who lived here put up the statue of Buddha because he filed the Buddhist religion [Music] the Japanese also have Rock Gardens between the Rocks there's sand and it can be red into different [Music] patterns most Buddhist temples have Rock Gardens this is probably the most famous one at the r I Temple [Music] by now it was past lunchtime so I bought some [Music] fruit I ate and looked around some more that's when I found this Japanese Cemetery [Music] some of the graves had plates of food on them people put them there for the spirits of their dead [Music] ancestors of course Kyoto isn't all cemeteries and temples there's a lot of other things too [Music] by now I was getting hungry again so I decided to get some ice cream since I couldn't speak the language I had to point out what I wanted they had this big glass case with samples well they were really just models of the ice cream they had to sell after I bought the ice cream I didn't have enough money left for the street car so I had to walk back to the hotel but it wasn't far I was kind of glad I missed that tour bus I had more fun exploring Kyoto by myself anyway the