Kyoto – Day 2.5: The Light Festival

Writing this blog is kind of time-consuming, so I split this part off into a separate post. The hardest part is picking a handful of pictures out of almost 500 to show you. I want you to see them all! But alas, I am limited by the storage capacity of wordpress.

When I left off we had just seen Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Temple in Kyoto. After that, we were pretty tired and things were closing, so we went back to the hostel to rest.

That night, though, we got to see an amazing display set up by the city. It was a light festival which they hold once a year. It starts at Nijo castle, which they put projectors on so the whole temple is lit up with images. After that, you’re invited to go on a walk through a small channel in the middle of the city where they have displays of cool art projects that revolve around the theme of “light”. It also talked about the disaster in Fukushima and how much it can cost just to keep the lights on. The cool thing was, a large part of the display was powered by a waterwheel that was placed upstream. As the water spun the wheel, it generated power to keep the lights on. Cool idea, huh?

: This was up at the entrance. It was all in Japanese, so I couldn’t read it:(

: The temple. My camera had trouble capturing the images, but this can give you some idea of what we were seeing.

: Inside a building near the Castle these women were playing some great hits. Including, but not limited to, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

: After we left the castle you can walk through a small channel. In the water they put little LED-lit balls that turn on when they touch the water. They flow down to the bottom where they’re plucked out of the water, then sent back up to the top of the display to begin the journey again.