Shugakuin Imperial Villa

By -
One of our favorite places in Kyoto was the Shugakuin Imperial Palace (as you can see from the score).

The gardens require that you apply to enter them in advance; we applied about three months in advance providing passport info and location where we are staying.  They only admit a limited number of visitors every day.  We also did one other tour, but the third palace was already at capacity.

View when you arrive at the upper villa
The set-up was similar to the visit to the Sento Imperial Gardens.  We got headsets and off we went.  

 The land has three villas: (literally) the lower, middle, and upper tea houses.   A you could suspect, they are at different altitudes.  The property only has tea houses; it was not a place that the shogun could even spend the night.  The shogun designed the gardens and ensured the views would be spectacular around each corner.

 The lower villa was subtle clothed in shadows and moss and delicate greenery.  



The grounds were linked with rice fields and flowers.





Aren't the fields spectacular?  

 The middle villa was beautiful as well.  It has the most famous shelves in Japan, the floating shelves.  They are supposed to remind the viewer of floating mist.


They keep the buildings open and the murals can be seen.  As we walked to the upper mural, the view is obstructed until you reach the top.  Then, the shrubs part leaving a pretty spectacular view (see the first picture of this blog)!

The upper villa was by far the best villa -- such beautiful views and the lake is beautiful.




The pond was beautiful and the maple leaves were just starting to turn.  We loved seeing the pond and each turn showed a different view.



Highly recommend this stop.  Just remember to book it as soon as possible!

Time at Villa: 1.5 hrs
Times visited: 1
Overall: A
Location: Shugakuin Yabusoe, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture 606-8052, Japan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cincinnati Art Museum

By -
Image
A couple of weekends ago, I dashed into the Cincinnati Art Museum to see the Treasures of the Spanish World exhibit.  The exhibit was created by the Hispanic Society and very c learly, the descriptions were written by the Hispanic Society.  The exhibit spanned the typical exhibit hall and then also one of the other halls sometimes used for exhibit too.   With my annual membership, I had free admission to the exhibit. The exhibits starts much further back than expected, which if I had read the description closely, I would have known.  It focuses on the holistic Iberian peninsula.  The exhibit is set up chronologically and has a mixture of art mediums.  The exhibit had descriptions of the art in both English and Spanish.  As i mentioned earlier, the descriptions were definitely written by the Hispanic Society as a few of them were quite complimentary about their collection and its possessions.   So I did end up taking a bunch of photos during the exhibit. A miniature of a cr
Read more

lower east side tenement museum

By -
to take advantage of the beautiful day in new york city, i thought i would try to take the lower east side tenement museum walking tour. i hustled down there and got there right in the nick of time. i have been to the lower east side museum for their tenement tours, but wanted to try this 1 1/2 hr walking tour, immigrant soles: a neighborhood walking tour . i saw some areas of the lower east side which i had never seen before. the tour guide was very good; he did a great job pointing out the interesting architecture making us think about what certain architecture features might mean. for example, a building with only three windows, what does that mean? answer: that it was meant to have a single family live there as opposed to twenty, since there was no partition splitting the building in two. he also brought up some of the different political tensions running through the LES that had not been mentioned in some of the other tours. perfect for a beautiful summer day. times v
Read more

Vatican Museum

By -
Image
After we were in St.  Peter’s Basilica, we ran over to the Vatican Museum .  While you may think Vatican City isn’t that big, it is about a 15-18 minute walk to the entrance of the Vatican museum.  We did buy tickets in advance.  It guaranteed us entrance without having to wait in line.  We bought tickets for right at opening since we had the crypt tour tickets for 11:30 AM.  What a mass of people.  All of the tours seem to get there right at 9 AM too.  We did push our way towards the front, which was allowed, but getting through the museum was crazy.  If I were to do it over again, I would have gotten them for after opening e.g., 10 AM or something like that.  While still a long queue if you had not pre-bought tickets, it seemed like the lobby was at least under control when we left. I knew we did not have a ton of time to dawdle in the museum even though we had about two hours in the  museum.  It sure did take a long time to navigate the tour groups.  We (more or less) foll
Read more