My heart lies in Kyoto

We are back in Tokyo from our three day two night trip to Kyoto. Both E and I fell in love. The little side streets full of food stalls and craft shops. The temples galore, oh the temples. The sweets, the smells, the electric poles that look like they haven't been updated in 50 years (seriously, they were scary!), the ryokan that we stayed in and loved, we miss it all.

In Kyoto we stated right in the heart of old downtown. We could walk to old Gion, the Nshiki Food Market, and our favorite temple so far, Kenninji Temple. Our ryokan (traditional Japanese hotel) was wonderful. We stayed in a big room with tatami mats, so no shoes allowed. When we arrived hot tea and sweets were waiting in our room. We fell in love with the small table and the pillows provided to sit on. We even explored the oforo bath, which is a comunial bath (full post to come!), and ate traditional dinners in our room served to us from the funniest Japanese woman, that would explain how to eat everything in full Japanese. E and I just nodded and looked at each other before trying something mysterious.

Here are a few guesses on what we ate:
Raw squid
Raw egg
Leaves
Pickled something (we had no idea what it was!)
Chicken liver (again, not sure what it was...)
Octopus (raw and cooked)
and many more.

Everything we ate, however the weird look, was really wonderful. We tried lots of new food and loved 90% of them. Even the Japanese breakfast was tasty, kinda.

More photos to come!