Hello All! As promised I am trying to get out and do interesting things during my special summer vacation. Today I visited the Kyoto Botanical Gardens with Libby (my coworker) and her fiance Simon. I took a bunch of photographs, so today I'm going to write less and let the pictures do most of the work. I saved these a bit larger than I usually do, so if you click on them you should get a larger, more detailed picture.
So, off we went. The Kyoto Botanical Gardens are about 20-25 minutes walking distance from my apartment. It cost 200 yen, or about $2.00 to get in to the park itself, and another 200 yen if we wanted to walk through the conservatory (which we did).
In this photo Simon and Libby stand by the gate and flaunt their entry passes. They were quite pretty, actually- they had flowers and a fairy on them. (the passes, not my friends)
This area was just beyond the gate, it was a sort of wide open Plaza, with lots of planters.
The bamboo garden held some 100 varieties of bamboo. Some of them were little more than shrubs, while others were 40 feet tall at the very least.
I think these are lotus plants. They weren't flowering when we came by, but the seed pods were still very pretty.
We found a whimsical statue of a sumo wrestler near the garden's playground. The sign explained that he was undergoing maintenance, and that we shouldn't mess about with him. The literal translation, however, could also be read as "In the middle of maintenance, please do not associate with."
Into the Conservatory!
The label on this plant read "Benihimonoki" which I think is Japanese for "plant that resembles a pink pipe cleaner."
(Insert a sharp remark here...that was a pointedly awful joke, wasn't it?)
Here I am! The three of us were sweating pretty constantly, as you can see from the front of my shirt.
Either I blinked or I really was that blissed out by having a giant leaf on my head. With all that heat it's hard to say...
Bonsai!
On our way out we visited the carp pond. The larger carp were well over two feet long, and all of the fish were so muddy brown that none of the photos came out very well. However, there were some very charming turtles that came to say hello, so I took their picture as well.
Anyway, the gardens were very nice and I look forward to maybe revisiting them in the fall when the leaves start to change!
-Andrew
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