There was also a section where you could leave your own haiku on a board:

They invited submissions, so I submitted a Bad Haiku on one of those strips of orange paper, although I couldn’t put it directly on the board, it went into a box for consideration instead. Mine was:

Alone by myself
Here in a foreign country
What am I doing?

Good times. Maybe they’ll put it up on display.

I went on to Tenryuji, but this was probably the worst and least remembered temple on my trip.

I balked and didn’t even go in once I saw this sign:

The temple cost 800 yen to enter, the garden cost 500 yen, and a side hall with a painting cost another 500 yen. Now we’re DLCing our entrance fees as well. I did pick up a goshuin for 300 yen from the public area here:

But it was more as a memory for how bad and greedy this temple was than anything else. It’s still a memory worth carrying around though.

There were some good picture moments outside the temple, although people tended to fixate on a couple bright trees and were missing the majestic forest, hills, and clouds:

I then went over to the bamboo forest. This was pretty, but there were way too many tourists about too, and by this point in the day I had run out of energy to be around tourists posing for inane pictures.

I struck out away from the tourist area, and away from predatory temple fees, exploring the Saga-Arashiyama area on foot. This, again, was by far the best part of this Arashiyama leg of my trip, and I enjoyed just watching people going about their daily lives and different types of houses. I watched children play in playgrounds, dogs barking furiously at each other from across bungalow walls, and a schoolboy enter and leave his house front gate wide open (likely for his parents car to return home and easily drive in later), and kick his shoes against a wall to knock off any caked dirt on it before heading into his house. Little precious moments like that.

I made a big loop and headed back toward Arashiyama, passing by at a small shrine next to a pond along the way, Mikami Shrine. I decided to get a goshuin from there too to wrap up this Saga-Arashiyama trek.

From here, I walked back to the nearby Saga-Arashiyama Station, and took the JR San’in/Sagano Line back to Kyoto Station where I was to later meet Akira.

Now that I had more space in my bag again, I stopped by to browse another branch of Book-off, a second hand bookstore chain that I had visited a couple times earlier in the trip, and found a few CDs from one of my favourite bands (marble) that I couldn’t resist picking up.

I then went to seek out dinner. For dinner, Akira had suggested that I stop by the JR Kyoto Isetan attached to the JR Kyoto station after 6 pm, as the food section in the basement closed at 7:30 pm (the entire store itself closed at 8 pm nightly). He said I could probably find lots of cheap sushi on sale there among other things since they needed to sell out before closing time. That sounded interesting, so I did so, going down to Basement 2 like he directed, where the floor was roughly divided into half, one half a regular supermarket and the other half a deli section with about two dozen different small stalls.

However, while I did find a couple sushi sections, one on the supermarket side and a small one on the deli side, neither one was discounted at all. A couple of small side dish/bento stalls had discounted their wares for 20% off though, so I ended up buying some stuff from one of them since I had to go meet Akira at the designated meeting spot nearby right after. My dinner ended up looking like this:

Only the rice at the bottom and the tofu on the left were mine, and they cost 894 yen together, which isn’t terrible. The tofu and its sauce were particularly amazing. and a great dip for everything else that we had. The sushi and croquettes were from a convenience store or something that Akira had picked up along the way to picking me up, he offered most of it to me (since he also had inari sushi and bread and other stuff, not pictured) and expressed surprise that I couldn’t find a heavily discounted sushi section. He called me a mystery girl (and joked that the stress from this mystery was shortening his life and he’d come with me tomorrow to look), on top of him calling me sunshine girl in general because it had been sunny through my entire stay in Kyoto and basically every day on my trip so far. Teehee.

Anyway, this day was weird. Whereas every other temple so far that I had been to on the trip so far, including super famous ones like Fushimi Inari Taisha and Sensoji, were free to enter, with optional donation or worship cost (that I often paid), the ones today were all greedy and cost money to enter. I definitely do not recommend either the Ohara or Arashiyama area temples to anyone. Their surrounding landscapes were great, though.