Continuing from Part 1 and Part 2 about our visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社).....

A short climb from the pretty lake mentioned in Part 1, you come, surprisingly, across a couple of small buildings, one a restaurant, straddling the path:

We stopped for a juice, and to chat with the lady. She was 86, and the fourth generation of her family to own/run the little restaurant. The shrine owns the land, but for whatever reason, the family has these buildings. The building across the path was her house; she had been born there.

I found out later, from [...]

Here are a few more pics from the early part of my visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) with Anthony yesterday....

I tend to take pictures of them whenever I see them (all the time), so I'm surprised that they've appeared on my blog only three times in the past, in posts about Arashiyama, Giouji Temple, and Konpukuji Temple (update: and Miyajima).

Part of yesterday's Elaborate Sub-Shrine facing the pretty lake....

I really liked the rack of gate offerings, as (I think) they made for some great imagery.

The real gates weren't so bad themselves, of course; with paths [...]

Zak sent me an article about some planned large-scale redevelopment around Kyoto Station, which reminds me that I've still not followed up on my earlier post about the area: The Most-Excellent Architecture of Kyoto Station.

When I snapped the picture above, I was standing in the huge atrium that is the shell around which Kyoto Station was designed. Beyond the glass oval thing in the center are the ticket gates, beyond which are the trains. Above the ticket gates is a glass-enclosed walkway connecting one area of the station with some restaurants and a hotel.

I really like the glass [...]

You may recall (from my shrine-closing ceremony post last fall) photos of a Shinto rite of hope and good fortune of some sort, involving the burning of small sticks that had people's names and ages on them. As the sticks burned, the wishes and hopes of the person rose with the smoke (to the gods, I guess).

As I hinted with the Hot Stuff post the other day, this rite was done as part of the Setsubun events at the Heian Shrine.

At the shrine-closing ceremony, perhaps 60 sticks were burnt. At the Heian Shrine this past Sunday, about 40,000 [...]

I noticed a tiny old house being demolished nearby the other day, and stopped in for a look. It could be anywhere from 40 to 100+ years old... the guys tearing it down didn't know, but it was built at a time when Japanese homes were still built with mud and bamboo for the walls.

There are still plenty of this kind of construction in Kyoto. Often, the outside of such walls are veneered in wood, as seen in my Randomly Photographed Stroll in Kyoto and Old Wood-Veneer Siding (Desktop Background) posts.

The shot above shows rough-hewn beams that were [...]