Slippers

Hello! We are now in Oz, relaxing back into a more familiar way of life......including shopping and eating steak!!! Kyoto was lovely, although we both prefer Tokyo! We visited many shrines and temples in Kyoto, and the most spectacular was the Golden Temple, Kinkakuji - really took our breath away! The moss covered zen gardens are also beautiful! For our time in Kyoto we stayed in traditional japanese style accommodation, a Ryokan. It was a lovely place and the people running it were very friendly. The most interesting part (and also slightly confusing) were the slippers! When you enter you must remove your shoes and put on slippers, then when you reach your room you remove your slippers and enter bare foot. On leaving your room to go to the bathroom you must wear your slippers once again, taking them off at the bathroom entrance and putting on bathroom slippers, then swapping back again to return to your room!!! Although we could not speak any Japanese, and the owners had only a little english we managed to communicate, and they treated us to green tea at every opportunity, and a very traditional breakfast.....including a slimmy egg in oil and smoked salmon, and of course rice!! Good to try once! A question to ponder.....why did a nation that eats rice with every single meal, invent chopsticks to eat with.....this in itself proved interesting!!!! Overall we loved our time in Japan, and were actually quite sad to leave....such lovely friendly people, and a culture and society like we have experienced nowhere else! Lots of love to you all Faye and Mark xx