Rainy walks in Kyoto

I visited Kyoto twice while I was in Osaka. The first time I went with two of my friends.

The train ride was beautiful, through little towns, rivers and hills in the background.

After we arrived, the first thing we did was have breakfast at a cute European-style bakery. There's lots of those in Japan, especially French - the Japanese love French stuff for some reason.

We walked around  lot and visited Shosei-En garden, the Imperial Palace, Nishiki Market and the old town.

We also saw an innumerable amount of temples and shrines.

Shosei-En garden was beautiful but a little bit boring for me. Honestly I could have skipped on this one.

The Imperial palace was nice but we couldn't go inside, so not much to see. However the walk in the huge park around it was really nice and refreshing.

We also passed by Nijo castle, but immediately decided to skip it when we saw the amount of tourist buses and queues.

All in all Kyoto was quite touristy. I had to come back a second time to visit some less touristy places (more on that in a second post).

Nishiki Market street

This is another long covered market street, full of all kinds of food and shops. It was actually really fun walking here and looking at all the stuff for sale! We ate a lot and everything was great. We also saw how mochi and matcha is made.

The street ended in a touristy but pretty shrine, where we had a robot give us out fortunes (so Japanese!) and took some nice photos.

The old town

Later we walked around the old town, which was also incredibly touristy. After sunset the crowds started thinning out and it was actually nice to walk around. We even saw a Maiko - Geisha apprentice!

We walked A LOT this day and were crazy tired by 6pm. We took the train home, but I decided to come back to Kyoto once more and look for its less-touristy side.