Japan Day 8- Tenryuji Zen Temple in Arashiyama and SUSHI!!!!!!!!!

The day started with breakfast on the 17th floor of our hotel overlooking the city and the mountains. We toured the Tenryuji Zen temple in Arashiyama. It rained the whole day and was so cold... I wore the wrong shoes!! But is was beautiful!! (Here in Japan they have heated toilet seats, which I actually love, but the water is so cold to wash your hands and the dryers to dry them are frigid cold air as well!  Someone needs to introduce heated dryers here to go along with the heated toilet seats!  That would be my Zen!)  We  walked through a dense bamboo forest that was so thick you couldn’t feel the rain!! It was sprinkling pretty hard too!  There as an area covered by moss and it looked like green carpet!  We also hiked around a beautiful mountain and gardens!! They gave us matcha tea with a sweet something we didn’t know what it was but I warmed my fingers on the bowl of tea!! (Didn’t drink it. It was awful!!). This was served in a beautiful tea room that we have found is very common here.  We saw typical Japanese water and rock gardens.  The rock gardens had carefully raked ripples to symbolize the waves of the sea.  For lunch we ate a typical monks meal— all vegetarian, which was included in the tour. It was very interesting and again...we didn’t know what most of it was but it was good! We had to take off our shoes again and I had no socks so my feet were cold!! (COLD was a theme today!)  There is a picture showing a lotus flower field.  It isn't lotus season, but I took a picture of it because it shows the murky and muddy waters I mentioned before.  I bet it is beautiful in bloom!  After lunch we had an hour to shop.  We walked in the rain around a street full of shops selling local handicrafts.  We stopped and got some chocolate croissants and a hot sweet milk...which was glorious relief on such a cold day!  We found some cute silk kimono style robes for each of the girls! A super cute but very slow little Japanese lady helped us but we almost missed our bus because she had to fold them just right and package them exactly perfect!! Hahaha! I love their attention to details, but we needed some Japanese efficiency at this point!!  I ran back to the bus and held it for Bill until he came back with our packages! Our tour guide Sunny wasn't very happy that we were 8 minutes late!!  When we got back to the hotel, we left again pretty soon after for a sushi making class. It was so fun!! This cute Japanese lady named Sumiko taught us and it was just Bill and I! She was a cute older lady and so gracious and polite! She took pictures of us on every step of the sushi making process!! Everyone is polite here and they always bow to you-- I love this custom!! I bow back and will probably still do it when I get back to the States! Hahahaha! We enjoyed the class and ate what we made after the class in another room on tatami mats! It was so good!! So yummy!! "Sumi" kept saying how happy she was that we enjoyed the food so much! I noticed that she waited until Bill got up after we ate to get up herself.  I am in awe of the courtesy here and how polite these kind people are.  I love the conservative society and the values they have!!  Well, we ate every last crumb of dinner and Sumi came out with a dessert we didn't know about.  It was yummy ice cream with a dried soy bean crumble on top with a sweet bean pastry on the side.  We waddled back to the hotel VERY full!!