The trip Far East

So the dream of going around the globe one day was taken forward one step when I went to Tokyo for a few days. While there, I had a chance to visit Kyoto as well.

Both cities are interesting places to visit. While both have the "old" and "new" sides to them, what is extremely fascinating to a tourist is the difference between the old and new sides of these cities and how you cross a street and see the old and new sides of the cities appearing and disappearing at will, one giving way to the other.

While on the old side you get to see ancient shrines, zen meditation centres, temples from the Buddhist period and numerous palaces and gardens built majorly with wood, all of them pretty stable and surviving many a natural calamities for a thousand years and more. A big set of them on the UNESCO World Heritage list too!



Cross over to the new side and you see skyscrapers, plush locales, suit-clad men and women on their way to work, big brands and great shopping districts completely and exactly the opposite of the old side.


And connecting the old to the new is an efficient transportation system, with the bullet trains being a special attraction. I was surprised at how we covered a distance of 500 kms in a couple of hours! Another attraction is the food. Food is big in Japan. You find hundreds of restaurants. Lots of varieties, cuisines and the preferred choice being sea food. Sakura - the cherry blossoms are another hard-to-miss things in Japan, especially if you are visiting in the right season.

Summarizing the trip to Japan I would say - Shopping, Restaurants, Shrines, Culture, Discipline.