It was an early and cloudy Kyoto [京都] morning when I woke up to walk to Heian Jingu [平安神宮], a shrine built in 1895 to celebrate that Kyoto had existed for 1100 years already. It was supposed to be an innocent visit, but then I came across something…

When I was snooping around the shrine shop I saw something – a stamp rally, shrine version. You had to go to five shrines in Kyoto and get their stamps in order to complete a tablet with the shrine stamps on the sides and centre of the four sacred beast of the town. It is the Kyoto Gosha Meguri ~Shi shin Sou Ou No Miyako~ [京都五社めぐり~四神四神相応の京~], and it unexpectedly trumped all my Kyoto visiting plans. This is how it looks like after the peregrination was completed:

Afterwards I walked alongside the Kamo river towards Gion [祇園], stopping to get the second stamp at Yasaka Jinja [八坂神社].

I was to meet D****e at 10.15 as she was coming from Osaka, where she was for a concert. She wanted to tag along to what I was going to do next, basically to… share the pictures with everyone. I had an appointment at 11am to do something that my sister and brother in law had ‘given’ me for my birthday. It is something I had always wanted to do, but the price had put me off – a maiko transformation photo shoot, in this case I chose a place called Maiko-Henshin Studio Shiki because B**** had recommended it.

This was a 98% great experience. 1% fell because I had a coughing fit (yeah, I’ve been neglecting to tell you about my almost-pneumonia, but remember, we’re only talking about the good things here) and the other 1% due to a communication failure with the studio upon reservation. However, that 2% is negligible and it was all in all amazing. D****e had a blast and decided that she needed to share the pictures with everyone she knew who knew me.

In this kind of experience you have a photo shoot in maiko clothes – maiko being young geisha-in-training. I honestly don’t know what got into me for wanting to do this, but the thought crept upon me until I actually asked for the money for this as a birthday present. The whole experience was booked online, and what you get is make-up (and wig), dress-up and photos, both in digital and printed-out form. The only problem that I found is that the photos are “staged”, in the way that they are the same for everyone, whether it is “your angle” or not. The main problem I found was having to take out glasses / contacts in order to do this, because I felt super-blind, which was a problem going down the stairs and choosing the kimono.

The problem was having to negotiate the extra picture I wanted, because that was not part of the pre-packaged photos, and it was apparently difficult to process that I wanted the samurai sword kind photo with the pretty maiko set-up. After the shooting, you get to go outside and play around with your phone and take selfies and stuff.

The whole thing took about two hours and afterwards I walked D****e to her station and headed off towards the third shrine of the , which I thought at the time would be the furthest-away shrine, Kamigamo Jinja [上賀茂神社], in the outskirts. There was some kind of art / craft fair there by university students, so it was very lively. Unfortunately too, a lot of it was under renovation.

After this I headed off back to the hotel to retrieve my luggage and undid my way to the station by subway. I had a while at the station, so I took a few fun pictures.

Finally I jumped on a train to backtrack to Himeji [姫路], which is south of Kyoto. I timed the visit to Maiko Henshin so D****e could come after all. I found my Himeji hotel and then went to walk around the castle. Actually, I should have been having some dinner but apparently I’m castle-distracted. I walked around the park and took a lot of pictures (and damn those fish in the pond are authentic sharks).