Richard Tan

Visited this beautiful place a few times with my family many years ago. Amazing that it is so well maintained.

You don't have to be a Buddhist to enjoy the serenity of this mountainous area. I am not.

It was a weekday that we visited. So the queue for the cable car was not very long. Please buy tickets online as it is much cheaper than buying on location.

The cafe desserts were delightful. I particularly liked the soya beancurd. They accept only cash payments.

Don't forget to take a stroll to the Wisdom Path.

Went there for dinner and lunch over two days. A short walk from Crowne Plaza Hotel where I was staying. The mall was very crowded.

Not a very big mall. But a lot of food outlets. Good food outlets. It has a multi storey bookshop. Very rare nowadays. I enjoyed walking through.

The best public toilets I have ever seen in any mall anywhere in the world.

But I didn't quite like the lifts and escalators arrangement of the mall. I could see that the arrangement was to ensure that people walk passed as many shops on every floor as possible to serve the needs of the shop owners.

It was rather frustrating that the lifts and escalators did not go to every floor or were hidden enough to make people walk in search of it.

This is an incredible place. Plenty of food and retail outlets, located in an area with even more interesting things to see, to do and to experience.

The food choices are a mix of mostly traditional dishes from many parts of China and the Southeast Asia region.

Famous stalls are clearly indicated by perpetual long queues of patrons.

Free seating tables and the floors are nowadays well cleaned, unlike the bad old days. But please do not expect a squeaky clean environment as this is afterall a hawker centre where people come for a quickly meal and move on.

Plenty of parking upstairs but it gets very crowded at peak hours where both parking lots and tables are hard to find.

Below the hawker centre are retail stalls selling mostly household needs for festive occasions and a traditional Asian wet market where fresh poultry, pork, beef, vegetable etc can be bought.

Extremely busy place with lots of food and retail outlets. This underground shopping mall has walkways that connect to the Kyoto train station and to many other shopping malls, food courts, etc. Hence, there is endless human traffic and long queues outside shops.

The area is extremely safe. I don't know what the patrolling security robots do. It is however easy to get lost because of the extensive network of walkways.

But ordinary Japanese and staff of JR Train are very helpful. They will show you the direction, even though they speak only Japanese. Just ask politely with the usual Japanese bow to say thank you. There are also helpful information counters where staff speak English and some other languages.

Plenty of Japan high standards of clean toilets around. Menus on restaurants have English versions. In some restaurants, they even have French, Arabic, Spanish etc translations.

Happened to walk passed it on my way out of Chinatown in June 2022.

On the map, no one would be able to tell that a place called Columbus Park would actually be a gathering place for mainly Chinese people and a place to commemorate the work of Sun Yat Sen who fought for China to become a Republic.

It was a nice place with a lot of activities. Full of mainly elderly Chinese playing board games and, of course, gambling with no cash visibly changing hands.

There were a few Chinese gentlemen singing Chinese songs accompanied by someone on a Chinese flute.

Just adjacent to the park was a basketball court where young people of several races were playing together.