Thursday (7/21/16)
After class, my plan was going to be to go to Yagitei=>Seimei Shrine=>Kyoto International Manga Museum, but I wasn’t feeling too good, especially since I had gotten heat stroke the day before.
Instead, I went with 2 other dorm friends and visited the shrine and temple near our dorm.
1)赤山禅院 Sekizan Zenin Our first stop! It was a long and complicated walk, but we managed to get there!! I have a lot of photos of the inside, but I can only fit so much in one post, I just picked a few that I liked. Sekizan Zenin included both a temple and a shrine. In fact, it included multiple!! Each for a different God and for different reasons to pray. (Money, Evil begone...etc.) This is where I got my first goshuin stamp! We had two options to choose from. A shrine’s goshuin (神社の御朱印) or a temple’s (お寺の御朱印). A friend went before me and had gotten the shrine’s so I got the temple’s. I honestly wanted both, but I didn’t have enough change and was a little shy to have the lady find change for me... Prepare some mosquito bite ointments!! This place extends into the woods so there were a lot of mosquitos!! I learned the hard way QQ
On our way to our second stop, we traversed through more small roads within the residential area. Again, I have a lot of photos from this walk so I just picked my favorites. It felt like we were in the countryside since there was fields and farm land here and there. One of my friends kept saying that it felt like we were in a Ghibli movie!! Right before getting to our second stop, we passed by a recreational center(?) that also had iced coffee, so we went in for some of that. I want to bring this up because the coffee there is really bad, DON’T DO IT. DON’T GO IN.
2)曼殊院 Manshuin
Our second stop! Unfortunately for us, we got there around 4:30 and had almost missed the last admission time, but that also meant we didn’t have a long time to really look at everything. (We rushed towards the end). Before going into the actual temple, at the door where we purchased our admission ticket, we left our goshuins there for them to stamp! I mustered up the courage to ask for both stamps, because at that point, I didn’t even have exact change for one LOL!! The lady was happy enough to accept my larger bill. After leaving our goshuins with the lady at the front, they gave us slips so we could remember to come pick up our goshuin booklets when leaving. Now into the temple. You have to take off your shoes!! Also, photos were prohibited in almost every part of this temple except the garden, which didn’t have much to look at. We were really bummed about this, but we kept to the rules of course. There were so many artifacts inside the temple!! A few scrolls handwritten by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga... We were lucky enough to have a monk, who was passing by (he was bringing rice offerings to different rooms), tell us some of the history and what was what!! His Japanese was a little hard for me to follow because it was historical AND he was sort of mumbling his words, but we managed to figure out most of the history.
I recommend going to Manshuin! They have a lot of interesting rooms and artifacts there! Some are replicas but the scrolls were the real deal!!
