Today started at 8:30 am with Professor Thomas Fingar giving a talk on “Japan Today”. At 10 am, we headed out in buses to see Kinkaku-ji (http://www.kinkaku-ji.or.jp) – Temple of the Golden Pavilion – and its beautiful gardens. The temple, which is also called Rokuon-ji, was built in 1397 by a shogun who later willed it to the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism. It’s representative of the temples of the Muromachi period.
Lunch was a traditional meal at the Shozan Resort (http://www.shozan.co.jp), and we continued by bus for 90 minutes to the village of Shiga and the Miho Museum (http://miho.jp/en) (opened 1997). On the way we watched a documentary about I.M. Pei and the mother and daughter who hired him to design the museum. It’s huge (215,000 sq ft building sitting on 247 acres). The hills and scenery around the museum were incredibly beautiful. 80% of the museum is underground in order to reduce the impact on its surroundings. There was a special exhibition that highlighted a tea bowl that was seldom shown in public. (Photo is below.)
We had our choice of tempura, teppanyaki, or kaiseki dinners tonight. Tom picked kaiseki at Kodaiji Manjiro (http://gion-hanasaki.com/) and I picked teppanyaki at Misono. The were both delicious. Tom’s meal had over a dozen courses, each with several different items. Mine had mounds of fried garlic (along with the steak). Yum! We had to pack up tonight to have bags ready by 7 am for transfer to the ship.
Here are photos of the Kinkaku-ji Temple:
And here of photos of Miho Museum. We couldn’t take photos inside, so some of these are borrowed from the museum site:
Other photos during the day, our dinners, and some photos of store fronts as I walked home:
Tom and Cheryl Travels 
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