I woke up to a gorgeous sunny morning and sat by the window drinking coffee and watching the sunrise for a while, then booked hotels and stuff for the next few days in Tokyo and rearranged hotels for the Iceland trip. Once all the adulting was done, I showered and dressed and headed northeast to Mt. Hiei known as the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism since the oldest buildings are from around 800 A.D. Once again the Kyoto buses failed me and I ended up walking to the trains and lost about an hour, gah! But the trains are almost always on time, so I made it up to the cable car and ropeway to the top of the mountain. I took the bus (that only does a loop so no way to get the wrong one) to Enryaku-ji, a Tendai monastery towards the top of the mountain. I didn’t know that the main temple is undergoing massive reconstruction for the next 12 years so it was completely covered. You could still go inside though, and it was funny because you could see where they had removed the metal decorations because the paint still looked fresh underneath versus where it was exposed to air and people. The whole mountain has temples and shrines scattered across it, but I mainly focused on the two bigger areas including Konponchudo Temple (the one that was covered up), Daikodo Temple, Amidado Temple (which has a really cool golden Buddha inside but you can’t take photos of it) and Hokkesojin-toto Temple. Supposedly there’s a monkey temple up there somewhere, but the sun was setting and I wanted to get to my next stop. I made my way back down the mountain and watched the sun set from the ropeway and cable car, the sky was pink and orange and the mountains were blue and purple so it was really beautiful.
Once down, I hiked about 20 minutes further north to Nyan-Nyan-ji. For those that don’t know “nyan” in Japanese is the equivalent of “meow” for us in English; it’s the sound a cat makes for them. Nyan-Nyan-ji isn’t actually a temple as the name suggests, it’s literally this guy’s house with the front part of it converted into a little tea house, gift shop, and in the back a shrine he built and dedicated to his cats. He is head over heels in love with his cats, and decided everyone else needed to worship them too so he built his shop and dresses his cats up in little monk outfits and lets them play with guests. I thought that they also took in shelter cats, but that turned out to be a rumor. They do take donations for the local shelter though, and they support local artists by selling their original cat themed artwork in their gallery. The owner’s son is also a very gifted artist who’s basically an art prodigy and won his first major award at 12 years old, and he painted all the cats everywhere in the interior of the building. The son was there today, so I bought one of his art books and had him sign it with his pen name. Who knows, maybe it will be worth millions one day? I picked up some other original art from the commission gallery, and sat with the cat of the day named Lon for a while until it was time to catch my bus downtown. I was a good hour out by then, so I just sat back and relaxed until it was time to get off then grabbed some food and went back to the hotel. Man, I love these deep soak bathtubs I’m really gonna miss this when I go home after this week…I can’t believe it’s already December!
