Well, the weather decided to dry up a bit today, although we did have a bit of a mid-afternoon shower.
Started the morning with a trip out to the Fushimi-Inari Taisha; a shrine complex dedicated to the gods of rice and sake. One of the things it's best known for is a trail around the hillside which is lined with, probably, thousands of red wooden torii and a number of statues of foxes (said to be messengers Inari, the god of the rice harvest).
The afternoon was spent having a leisurely stroll around the Kyoto Imperial Place Gardens (the palaces itself required advance booking to view and didn't appear to be open today). The park is fairly typical of other Japanese parks being mostly trees, once again showing a wide variety of autumnal colours. Given it's the weekend there was also a fair amount of activity going on; although here it tended to be more sport-related (compared with the parks in Tokyo). In particular baseball seems to be a big thing here, and there also some oldies playing a game that looked a little like croquet but wasn't (not enough hoops was the most noticeable difference). The tree-lined pathways also lead to some wonderful views with the surrounding hillsides being visible in the background.
Finally, I had a wander around downtown Kyoto. Most of the downtown area is a pedestrianised area which is also covered. Overall it's your typical shopping area, with some not-so-typical and fairly weird things. To give you a taste, things I noticed on my wander around included the usual things like clothes and food shops, a guitar shop (with quite an extensive selection to choose from), some "100 Yen" shops (or "Poundland" to those back in the UK), a couple of arcades full of those crane grab machines filled with soft toys, and a model gun and "US Surplus" shop (which looked more like a real gun shop from a distance). I'm also sure I saw a guy walk past in what looked like military fatigues with what appeared to be the business end of a gun of some sort sticking up out of his backpack (I'm assuming he was a customer of the model gun shop!) And there was also the obligatory gaggle of schoolgirls (in uniform - something you see quite often even at a weekend here) who suddenly got very excited when they saw a shop selling headband things with reindeer antlers (along with other Christmas-related headgear!) Oh, and of course lots of cyclists; even though I'm sure there were signs telling people not to ride bikes!
Anyway, tomorrow morning I leave Kyoto and head for Hiroshima; so another few hundred kilometers to be clocked up on the Shinkansen network. Making sure I get the most out of my rail pass!