Wabi-Sabi Temple Tour - Gold Temple

We exited the bus and walked to the Gold Temple. The walk through the grounds was quite beautiful; the leaves were just beginning to change colors and the grounds were magnificent. I could not stop snapping photographs. Ross and I commented that it is difficult indeed to take a bad photograph in the temples of Kyoto.

The Gold Temple was very pretty, sitting in the middle of the north shore of a small serene lake. Misato commented that some Japanese had been upset when the gold facade had been updated, but why complain since this was the original color of the temple? Would they have not liked it then, if they lived during the time when it was originally built? Better to renovate it than lose it forever to decay.

The grounds were large so we walked slowly through them, taking tons of pictures of course. At one spot there was a small stone statue with a stone bowl and hundreds of coins at the base of these two things. Misato explained that you would be granted a wish if you tosses a coin into the bowl. I tried once but did not make it. I tried again, inadvertently skipping the coin off the pile in front of the bowl... and it bounced in! I had wished that we move to Japan and have a child.

There was another small lake with a tea house built for one of the shoguns overlooking it. A few pathways had been roped off, so I can only imagine what beautiful things we were not able to see. But what we could see was all magnificent.