You may forget that I still didn't finish writing about my last year Japan trip, but now I'm ready to write it again.
To read the first post here:
Day two of our trip started with one of my dream that I always wanted to fulfill and it's was wearing Furisode (振袖).
Ok, I'm not turn into 20 on that day, haha. Because this kind of Kimono is worn, when celebrating Coming of Age Day the year a girl turn 20, and it's signifies that she is both single and a legal adult, and available for marriage - information from Wikipedia (don't get me wrong, I'm still happy with my life as a single ).
But it's beautiful and glamorous, I really wanted to try it a long time ago.
I made my wish came true at 京都きものレンタルwargo京都駅前京都タワー. And after transformation, we went to learn about Japanese tea ceremony (茶道).
We're walking to Tea ceremony Juanin, where we booked for the session. In autumn, the weather was not hot, even it's not easy to walk in Zōri (草履- Japanese Sandals), we're still having fun.
When we arrived there, we had been led into tea room, where they prepared all the equipment for us. Beside from the three of us, there were 4 more people who joined this session too.
The instructor made the first cup of tea for us and it was thick tea (koicha-お濃茶・おこいちゃ）that we had to take just one sip and pass the cup to next person after cleaning the rip of the cup with paper. I was a bit shock, ^^" I'm not use to drinking or eating with other people, and right now I had to drink tea from the same cup with total strangers, so if you're not feel easy with it you may need to inform the instructor or just book the session for your group only.
Next we learnt how to make the tea（usucha-お薄・おうす）by ourselves, and had it with Japanese sweet (wakashi-和菓子). the bitterness from Matcha, went well with the sweetness from wakashi.
Tea ceremony is not only a tea party, that people come to chitchat, in the tea room we learnt to appreciate the cup, the sweet that they served, the decoration of the room, the flower arrangement that present the season it's a way of living in harmony with people and nature.
To follow our theme, we walked for our next stop, Kaikado Café beautiful cafe, that situated in 90-year-old building.
開化堂 (Kaikado) was established in 1875, it's famous from hand crafted tea caddy, and now in 6 generation of the owner, they opened their own cafe. It's the place that you can sit down, relax and yes, you can buy their product here, too.
We ordered coffee with light meal, and some sweet the tablewares were charming, and the ambients were marvellous.
One of my recommendation was Kaikado cheesecake, it's rich with lightly sweetness that made you want to eat more and more.
We had a plan to spend time in Gion (well with lovely kimono, it's the best destination), and to save our time, we took a taxi to Gion.
I really wanted to go to 無碍山房 Salon de Muge beautiful Japanese style cafe, but when we reached there, we saw the closed sign.
Anyway, it's not hard to find delicious Japanese sweet cafe in Gion, so we walked to Rakushō (洛匠 - らくしょう) instead.
There were many delicious Japanese style desserts to choose from, and we enjoyed our sweet moment here.
But our sweet journey for today was just started, plus we needed a lot of walk to burn all the energy that we had intake !!!!!!
Our next stop was JEREMY&JEMIMAH.
Where we ordered the enormous cotton candy ^^.
Well, it's delicious esp. the Sakura Mochi flavour, with salty sweet, it kept us eating until we realized that we couldn't eat it anymore, haha.
Before feeding ourselves more sweet, we took a walk around Gion, it's not practical to wear Fusisode and take photo with my (almost 2 kg) camera ^^" but I just couldn't stop taking load of photo in this charming place.
And now I'm ready for next portion of sweetness. This time for delicious shaved ice, we went to GION NITI (祇園NITI).
The shaved ice were delicious, and the staffs were so nice, because when my sister asked them about the thing that they put in the shaved ice, they ran into the kitchen and came back with a piece of paper with the name of the it.
You might wander how could we lived with only the sweet, well we already had a plan for legendary Tempura place in the evening.
The place is Yoshikawa Inn (料理旅館・天ぷら 吉川) that opened from 1952.
We booked Tempura counter bar, where we could see the chef cook fresh food and tempura for us.
The course that we had was "Karigane".
We would be served
1 Appetizer
1 Sashimi
For Tempura, it would be 11 kinds, 14 items
1 A Refreshment Dish
1 Rice with Miso soup, Pickles
And finished our dinner with Fruit
It's a load of things to eat, haha but the freshness of the ingredients made everything so tasty, one of the thing that I had to say is if you love tempura you need to try eating it in this kind of special tempura restaurant, and you will understand what I felt.
After a long, long day with pretty kimono, delicious sweet and food, we came back to the hotel, and had a good night sleep.
Today, it's our last day in Kyoto, and I still didn't have enough of it.
We started early, and went to Kyoto tower building return the Kimono before going to other places.
But I was hungry, haha, so we stoped at the station, and bought some breads at Oreno (オレノパン) pan in Kyoto station.
And I love their croissant very, very much.
It packed with flavour with flaky crust, ^^ you have to try it by yourself, to understand how delicious it was.
As I wanted to know more about Kyoto craft, this time we booked for Kyo-Yuzen Dyeing Workshops at Marumasu-Nishimuraya (丸益西村屋).
We would learn how to make Kyo-Yuzen Dyeing.
Kyo-Yuzen, a technique of painting dye directly onto cloth, was invented in the middle of the Edo era, towards the end of the 17th century.
It's simply and fun, first you will need to choose what you want to make, book cover, small handkerchief and etc. then choose pattern, and start having good time.
It's easy, and three of us made more items than we planed, haha, well, the artist in me was so happy with the result.
Beside from making by yourself, you can buy lovely Japanese style fabric items here, most of them are hand made too.
It's lunch time when we finished the workshop, so after a long queue and 30 minutes waiting ,we could get into Honke Owariya(本家尾張屋本店) finally.
Honke Owariya(本家尾張屋本店) is a Japanese soba restaurant that opened since 1465 (at 2018 it's 553 years old).
I ordered 宝来そば (Hourai Soba), a huge and bold menu ^^.
It came with a set of 8 small toppings: shiitake mushrooms, shredded thin omelet, sesame seeds, shrimp tempura, wasabi, nori, Japanese leeks and grated daikon.
And a piece of paper that show you how to enjoy it.
Open each box of black lacquer ware, you will find small amount of soba noodle.
Mix it with the topping that you want, and enjoy !!!.
Now we were full, but rather than filling ourself with more sweet, we would go to Kinkaku-ji (金閣寺).
This place is so famous, esp. if you know Ikkyū-san, a Japanese anime based on the historical Zen Buddhist monk Ikkyū.
It's beautiful, but there were load, and load of tourists, plus it's not easy to take good photo, as they don't let you use tripod (I understand that it will disturb other people).
Luckily, we could get close to the fence. so I placed the camera on the fence, and took the photo!
The most beautiful thing for me was the reflection of the golden building in the water, and I hope you agree with me.
We left Kinkaku-ji around 4pm, now I wanted to have some sweetness.
We rushed to Toraya Karyo Ichijo (虎屋菓寮 京都一条店) as it's almost 5 pm and the shop close at 6pm, I fell in love with this place since the first time that I came to Kyoto (read more about this place here).
Today we would have special dinner with Matsumiyasan at her friend's restaurant.
The place was 和○輪 miyakoの台所 (〒605-0089 京都府京都市東山区元町367-8), the owner Miyakosan was the one who cooked and prepared the table for us.
This small place serve home style Kyoto food, and it's only 5 of us for tonight.
I started my dinner with Reishu ( 冷酒) or cool Sake (one of the sake that I become addicted to it after this trip).
And it's fun to choose the cup that I want to use by myself.
The food was simple, with seasonal ingredients and local products, but all of them were made with care.
Miyakosan was so nice, she even gave me a bottle of Yuzukocho (柚子胡椒- paste made from chili peppers, yuzu peel and salt, which is then allowed to ferment) after I tasted it and told her that I liked it so much.
Not only the homey atmosphere, I think it's very good to see someone smiling while cooking for you too.
We ate a lot that I couldn't remember how many dish that she served, haha.
The most important thing was all of them were delicious.
But not only happy dinner time, when we said that we would take morning train to Nagaya the next day, Miyokosan didn't hesitate to make Onigiri for us to have as our breakfast on the train too (Thank you, Miyokosan, I will go to visit you again).
We took a taxi back to the hotel, today's room was it's a studio with loft bed type, and my niece really excited (it's good to be a kid, you could be excited with everything, haha).
I had a good night sleep (due to Reishu ^^), and tomorrow we would go to a new place Nagoya, where a lot of delicious food were waiting for us.
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