Spring in Kyoto is everything you've been told it is, and also nothing like it.
Arashiyama at 6 AM
Everyone photographs the bamboo grove. Almost no one does it at dawn. I walked in alone at six in the morning, mist still hanging between the stalks, the only sound my own footsteps on gravel. By nine the crowds would be three-deep on the path.
A breakfast ritual
Every morning I walked ten minutes from the guesthouse to a small cafe called Kissa Madoka. The owner, an old woman who spoke no English, would nod me toward my usual seat by the window. Thick toast, a soft-boiled egg, a small salad, and a pot of pour-over coffee.
She never asked what I wanted. She remembered from day two.
The quiet temples
The temples that stayed with me were the ones whose names I never learned: a small garden behind a souvenir shop in Gion, a moss-covered path I stumbled onto while looking for a train station, the sub-temple of Daitoku-ji where an old monk was sweeping leaves in complete silence.
Travel, I think, is really about collecting these.