kyoto - daimonji festival

wow this festival was sooo long ago but i still want to put up some pictures about it here.

the japanese have this event called o-bon, which is like a combination of the Chinese Qing Ming festival and Hungry Ghost festival. basically, the belief is that sometime in August, the spirits of one's ancestors will return to the material world, and when that happens, you have to clean their graves, pray to them and so on. they dont do offerings in mainland japan - they do in okinawa though - but the general idea is the same.

so for daimonji (大文字) festival in kyoto, what they do is light 3 giant kanji characters and 2 symbols on the slopes of 5 mountains (1 on each slope), and these are meant to guide the spirits back to their realm.

here you can see the kanji 大 burning:

there were tonnes of people in kyoto for this festival, but frankly i think it was wayyyy overhyped! the mountains were all so far from each other, so you had to walk forever if you want to see all the characters and symbols - we walked quite a bit but only saw one and a half! - and the view isnt that impressive either. 

i liked the little sightseeing that we did around kyoto far more.

along the main (?) river that runs through kyoto :

nice old looking building:

i love these kind of stone signs:

the entrance to a shrine:

me:

sunset:

the lawson colours - it's a convenience store - are usually red, blue and white, but in this part of kyoto they colour coordinate with the surroundings:

the very pretty genkan - entrance hallway - of some building in gion:

and i managed to see a maiko - trainee geisha - too!

there were soooo many tourists waiting around to catch a glimpse of maiko, but it turns out that this one was actually a decoy because after she made her appearance, a few more apparently came out from the geisha house - i dont know what you call it - and entered taxis that were waiting for them. my friend caught a few pictures of more maiko, but the whole experience of doing a stakeout outside the geisha house and following the maiko to catch a shot of them was quite fun :)