Realized that we don't have a thread for this amazing city.
Any recommendations for restaurants and sights?
For those who haven't visited, this bit of prose captures the spirit of the city:
When we say in the West, that a town is attractive, we usually mean that, viewed from a point of vantage, it presents a pleasing prospect; one in which each building, square and spire contributes, by design or otherwise, to a whole. Few Japanese cities or towns do that. Bombs and fires and earthquakes and storms and the separate attentions of 510,000 busy construction companies have ensured that they do not. When a Japanese person tells you that Kyoto, the former capital, is a "beautiful" city , he does not mean that if you climb Mount Heia and looked down at its roofs, you would be struck - as you would be by Florence from Fiesole or Oxford from the tower of the University Church - by a sense that the whole was magically greater than the sum of its parts. When you view Kyoto from any point of vantage, such as the elevated platform where the bullet train deposits you, its ugliness can make you weep. Its tangled utility-cabled skyline is indistinguishable from that of any other Japanese city of comparable size, and every bit as jolting. The attractions of Japanese cities - if they have attractions - lie in what they contain, not in the prospect they present. Kyoto is "beautiful" because within it there are beautiful things; subtle, sometimes tiny details that resist the cacophony around them and may require a lifetime to unearth.
Alan Booth in Looking for the Lost
Any recommendations for restaurants and sights?
For those who haven't visited, this bit of prose captures the spirit of the city:
When we say in the West, that a town is attractive, we usually mean that, viewed from a point of vantage, it presents a pleasing prospect; one in which each building, square and spire contributes, by design or otherwise, to a whole. Few Japanese cities or towns do that. Bombs and fires and earthquakes and storms and the separate attentions of 510,000 busy construction companies have ensured that they do not. When a Japanese person tells you that Kyoto, the former capital, is a "beautiful" city , he does not mean that if you climb Mount Heia and looked down at its roofs, you would be struck - as you would be by Florence from Fiesole or Oxford from the tower of the University Church - by a sense that the whole was magically greater than the sum of its parts. When you view Kyoto from any point of vantage, such as the elevated platform where the bullet train deposits you, its ugliness can make you weep. Its tangled utility-cabled skyline is indistinguishable from that of any other Japanese city of comparable size, and every bit as jolting. The attractions of Japanese cities - if they have attractions - lie in what they contain, not in the prospect they present. Kyoto is "beautiful" because within it there are beautiful things; subtle, sometimes tiny details that resist the cacophony around them and may require a lifetime to unearth.
Alan Booth in Looking for the Lost
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