February 1: The Golden Pavilion

I just love things that live up to their hype. The first time I experienced this was in the Louvre at age 16 in front of the Mona Lisa. I walked all the way to the farthest end of one of the wings, fought my way past the crowds, peered through the bullet proof case -- and the painting was simply gorgeous. I stood there with my friend Tracey and we watched and discussed and decided it deserved every bit of notoriety it had.

The Golden Pavilion, or Kinkaku-ji, is also such place. While reportedly often overwhelmed with crowds, today in the dead of winter at 9 AM, the temple grounds were empty. The pavilion is nothing short of stunning. The gold-covered walls are so shiny and so expansive, that you can only use words like brilliant and dazzling to describe them. The temple juts out over a reflecting pond that is so still and clear that it is called the mirror pond. The precise, upside-down image in the water is one of the reasons the tableau is so beautiful.

The original building was built in1397, but the reconstruction that stands today was built in 1955 after, as my Kyoto Lonely Planet puts it, "a monk consummated his obsession with the temple by burning it down." And while that destruction is nothing but a travesty, I am mostly consumed with images of how a film of melted gold must have glittered as it shimmied across the pond. I can understand his obsession.