Our first stop today was at the home of a tea master who demonstrated the preparation of tea and explained the tea ceremony which would normally take four hours. Ironically, Michael is not Japanese but Swiss. He became interested in the tea ceremony through martial arts and now lives in Japan and provides lessons in both.
Next, we visited Daitoku-ji, a complex of temples
where we learned something about the man who invented the tea ceremony, or at least formalized the ritual, Sen No Rikyu. He is also credited with developing the concept of wabi-sabi, beauty through simplicity, a concept I can definitely get behind. We had an opportunity to view some gardens that Sen had designed. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures and the post cards they had available did not capture what I would like to have taken pictures of. One interesting thing we were told is that the white rock gardens associated with Zen Buddism came 
about because there was a big fire in Kyoto back in the 15th century and after all the temples had been rebuilt there was no money left to replace the classic gardens so groomed white rocks were substituted for water.
Next stop was lunch at a restaurant specializing in vegetarian food. Every dish was delicious and almost enough to convince me to become a vegetarian. I do think the cooking must be very labor intensive. As always the presentation was beautiful but I had to give up my camera bag at the door and was too lazy to go back and get it so again, no picture.
We rounded out the day at a Raku museum. This apparently refers to a rusti
c sort of pottery used for tea bowls which has been produced by the same family for 15 generations. Personally, I could not see what all the fuss was about. But they also had a display of Noh masks which was of more interest to me. But once again, no photographs. I’m beginning to understand that the advantage of cell phones over real cameras is it is easier to cheat in a situation like this. They did, at least, have some nice flowers in their front garden. From there, we caught a cab back to the hotel and are once again on our own for dinner. I am thinking of returning to the Nishiki market to taste some street food and look for souvenirs.
I was more successful at finding souvenirs than food. I eventually ran into Jodi and Marc on my way back to the hotel but they were going all the way back to the shopping arcade for Sukiyaki and that seemed too far to me at that point, especially for Sukiyaki. So, I headed back with the idea of eating something at the hotel when I spied some American style sandwiches at a coffee shop and grabbed those and a beer from the vending machines and settled into my room for the night.
Haiku:
Whisking green powder
Precise and focused movement
Ancient ritual