Stay at Ryokan, Kyoto 2016

In Kyoto we stayed at a ryokan (旅館 ), which is basically a traditional Japanese inn circa the Edo period (1603–1868). The inns only have a few guests. The rooms are tatami-covered. Baths are "communal" though how communal varies depending on the ryokan. Visitors must remove shoes and may wear yukata and slippers.

Arriving at our ryokan Izuyasu 

Lobby of our ryokan

Pictured below is our room. The room had a name instead of a number. It was the "Happiness" room. That's a little table where you sit on a chair at floor-level. The floors are tatami covered, and that's my bed on top, a thinnish mattress on the floor.

Our room- everything is on the floor

The baths are a big draw in ryokans. We had semi-private ones in our ryokan. So a typical bath would be public and separated by gender. At our ryokan there were five sets of guests and three private baths. So we changed into our yukata and shuffled downstairs to the baths in our slippers.

Wearing yukata

There are gardens in areas that we can see inside the ryokan, such as the hall or the bath windows, but are in the open air.

Garden you can see from the hall

The next morning we woke up way before breakfast because we were still jet-lagged. Our ryokan served either breakfast or dinner per day you stayed there. We were signed up for breakfast which was really a dinner in the morning. The Japanese don't really do breakfast. This was actually perfect for us because it's hard to get a good breakfast there and since we were kind of on US time- we were actually eating it at what felt like dinnertime to us. Plus we needed fuel because next up- we were hiking up the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine!

Our room was very bright in the morning

Breakfast is served!

Breakfast Thursday morning

Most of these were yummy