KYOTO – FIRST IMPRESSIONS

We arrived in Kyoto last evening on the train from Tokyo—a lovely ride, I might say, through countryside that was lush and green interspersed with clumps of houses and other buildings, occasional bits of industry—into the splendidly modern Kyoto Station, and took a taxi to the Hearton Hotel where we are staying, not all that far from the Imperial Palace and its park.

A shiny shop in the Kyoto Station. (my photo)

I was struck immediately by how different this city feels from Seoul—a difference that is in large part I think a result of its streets laid out on a grid. Here edges are clear and sharp, the streets run straight and flat. They don’t go up and down or twist away, at least so far as we’ve seen. This difference has a psychological effect—I don’t feel nearly as at risk of getting most as I did in Seoul. Though perhaps that’s illusory.

In fact Kyoto has existed on a grid since the 7th century, when the Emperor Kammu proclaimed it the site of the new capital, called Heian-kyo. According to the Lonely Planet, it “was laid out in accordance with Chinese geomancy in a grid pattern adopted from the Tang dynasty capital, Chang-an.” There are rivers here, but they haven’t affected the grid.

The weather has been rainy, and cool, in contrast to the bright sunshine and heat we had just before leaving Seoul. We’ve enjoyed walking, in spite of the rain, wandering today along a stretch of the Kama River and through a small section of the Imperial Palace Park, where we watched fervent tennis players continue their play through quite heavy rainfall. The dragonfly pond we noticed on the park map turned out to be inaccessible, though we could glimpse lotus leaves through the mesh of fence and shrubbery that surrounded it.

A path in the Imperial Palace Park. (Photo: Peter Harris)

We watched mallards swimming in the river, and also saw two large waders—a grey heron, and an egret (can’t be more specific than that). Large crows were reasonably abundant and a small black and white bird with a fluttery wing movement darted over the river’s surface like a swallow. A very large raptor circled and balanced briefly overhead, its wing-tips splayed like a vulture’s. We heard lots of songs and calls from shrubs and trees. Of course I’d left the binoculars in the hotel …