There was no turkey to be found for dinner.  The closest we could get to it was the tempura we had at lunch.  This means the vegetables, fish, and prawns you are served are fried.  On the plate was a fried piece of sweet potato.  Southern Thanksgiving dinners usually have a sweet potato, so I imagined very briefly how I usually spend Thanksgiving in Georgia.
      But as the saying from the "Wizard of Oz" goes, "This isn't Kansas anymore."  Hardly!  Today was Kyoto, a 1 1/2 hour ride by bullet train from our "base city" of Hamamatsu.  Kyoto was the capital of old Japan before the modern era took it to Tokyo.  A retired teacher, who is an acquaintance of another group member, was kind enough to go with us as a guide, plan an itinerary of the tourist highlights, and arrange for a car and driver to take us from place to place.  He had beautiful manners and even thought of  bringing us small trays of food and canned tea (which comes out of the vending machines already warmed up) to have breakfast on the train since we left too early for the hotel restaurant to be open.  You can only appreciate how fast the bullet train goes when you pass another one.  All the windows and cars blur together, and you've passed it in two seconds.
     We visited 4 important shrines in Kyoto -- both Buddhist and Shinto.  Buddhism is the main religion in Japan.  There was a golden Buddha at one that you rub to bring luck and health.  Of course, we rubbed him.  Shinto beliefs center around a deep appreciation for the beauty in nature.  The maple trees (what we call Japanese maples at home because of the small leaves) gave us a bountiful, brilliant red color in the gardens and pathways in the shrines and temples.  They were very striking against the Golden Pavilion Shrine, so named because it's covered entirely in gold leaf.  That's a lot of gold when you think it takes 20 ounces of gold to leaf the large dome of our state Capitol building in Georgia.  The Golden Pavilion Shrine is so large, your first reaction is that it must be yellow paint, but it's real gold.  I'll show you pictures of the red and yellow brilliance.
     In Kyoto, there are 1600 temples and shrines.  We hardly scratched the surface of this city where shrines dating from the 8th century are side by side with the type of building or business any large, modern city of 2 1/2 million people would have.  Somehow, there is compatibility despite the centuries of change,
     Akio, our escort, is quite religious and stopped at the altar of every temple to pray for his ancestors, as is the Buddhist custom.  We prayed, too, but our prayers for Thanksgiving - for family and friends we were missing today, for a safe journey, and for the blessings we have to work and learn on this trip to Japan.