Kyoto Pics

Wow, we are down to our last week in Matsumoto! Its unbelievable how fast time is flying, but I'm not complaining!! I'm so excited to get on with my life in Utah. I'm excited for my own car, schedule, and house. I'm also excited for HD in English!!!
Here are the Kyoto pics we took when we were there 2 weeks ago. Kyoto was amazing and I loved every minute of it!!! I love Kiel so much!!!! That doesn't really have anything to do with Kyoto, I just wanted to add it in there...
This is a lot of pics but I just couldn't leave any of them out! Japan is so beautiful and has so much culture. America is culturally lame. The end.

Kiel and I were saying how nice the Tanaka's car was when WHAM! They slammed into two granite pillars, breaking them in half and crushing the car. We felt so bad

This is the most famous Zen Art rock pond in Japan

This is completely plated in real gold

I WISH I could've taken a picture of inside this shrine. There are 1000 golden gods enshrined in it and in the middle of all of them is a giant god buddah thats at least 30+ feet and it has like 100 hands holding all these cool things...it was so amazing!!! And there was a priest that was offering incense and chanting in front of the buddah while we were there. Really cool.

This poor guy had to pull this Big Japanese guy up a really steep, long hill.

This was at the actual festival. There were so many people for like 20 blocks that you could hardly walk. I got so claustrophobic!!!

The sumo championships were going on in Nagoya and this guy was one of the lower ranked Sumos! He is one of the smallest sumos I've seen..well, he's the only Sumo I've seen in real life

Nagoya Castle

The Tanaka Family!!! We stayed with them the whole time we were in Kyoto; they are super nice!!

The (incredibly expensive) cake we bought for them to say thank you! I think its very cute

These are called Tori--and are entry ways to shrines. They go on for miles, all the way up a mountain and back.

This picture does not do this statue justice. It is HUGE!!! Literally the size of a small mountain.

Oops I forgot to flip! This lady had 2 feet of tissue hanging out of her pants and it gave me a good laugh for quite a while!

She wants to eat you.