My stay in Kyoto was a short but memorable one. Something you should know about Kyoto before going there is that this is a city with a lot of history. And the people living there know it. You are bound to run into some tourist attraction that does a good job of attracting but doesn’t do as well on satisfying, as you would on every famous place in the world including my home city of NYC.

With that out of the way, I must tell you that I’ve fallen in love with Kyoto. I did not pay much attention to the individual historical sites (although I still loved some of the museums and temples in the place). The one thing that gripped me the most was the atmosphere I felt while walking around the city. Far from bustle of Osaka or Tokyo, this city had distinct and persistent color and light, like a masterpiece of a painter. All the while I was there a faint and refreshing aroma of pine forest was in the air, calming my nerve and recalling some sort of distant nostalgia, from a city I’ve never before stayed in my life!

I still keep my memories of the place fondly, and the atmosphere and the air of the place is still very vivid in my mind. I hope anyone planning to visit Kyoto can have the same mystifying experience I had.