71: TORII, BAMBOO, AND MONKEYS

The Fushimi-Inari Shrine is the coolest shrine I've ever been to - it has 10 000 torii gates lined up in a row.

We also went to Sanjusangen-do, a temple which has 1000 life sized statues of the 1000-armed Kannon (the Buddhist goddess of mercy) surrounding a gigantic statue of Kannon, inside the longest wooden building in Japan. There are actually only 40 arms on Kannon, but each arm saves 25 worlds, so that is supposed to equal 1000. On top of the 40 arms, Kannon also has 11 heads. It's too bad we weren't allowed pictures in the temple, because it was an awesome sight.

The Arashiyama area, my favourite area in Kyoto, was beautiful and scenic. We went to the bamboo grove and to Monkey Mountain. It was an experience being surrounded by monkeys in the wild who kept screeching and running around with red butts. The little hike up to the monkey park was so hot and tiring that we needed to get gelato at a gelateria that won third place at an international gelato contest!

I received some horrible news from home today, and it made me think about how so many bad things are happening in the world right now. There is just so much death and destruction going on everywhere. Life is short, and it is so fragile, and anything can happen when you least expect it. I can't even fathom how people deal with all this devastation when it happens to their loved ones. Your whole life can change in the blink of an eye, and there's nothing you can do about it.