Cultural Tourist City Kyoto

Kyoto is the opposite of Tokyo in more ways than I could have guessed. The entire city is laid out on a grid, and has been for a thousand years, not because of any logical principles of navigation but because the Chinese planners who advised the city’s original construction believed that squares are pretty. (This accidental discovery of the modern street grid was outdone only by the accidental discovery of flex space.)

The city as it exists today is ancient: Kyoto has enjoyed a thousand years of uninterrupted growth: it was never abandoned or burned down or bombed or anything like that. (We deliberately chose not to bomb it in World War II because of its cultural value.) The city you see today is the city of a thousand years ago, just in a more evolved form. So you can be walking down the street and you’ll pass, in sequence: a bank… a noodle shop… a couple-hundred-year-old shrine… a convenience store… And it’s only when you look closer that you notice the noodle shop is a hundred years older than the shrine.

Kyoto has been officially designated an International Cultural Tourist City, famous for its castles, palaces, temples, shrines, and shopping malls. We spent three days around Kyoto, one of them at the nearby city of Nara, before finally, reluctantly, returning to the beginning to conclude our trip.