An Ise tale continued

It's been nine days since posting! What has happened? Well I have just been busy! It's been an amazing last week or so, my company classes really filled out for August and partially for September (thanks Satomi and Time Life gang!) and it really felt great to have a productive week. The unfortunate thing is that I had little time to sit in front of the PC. I will try to get back on track now.

Our first day in Ise continues... Our Japanese style inn was very close to one of the 2 areas for Ise Jingu- known as Geku. We headed out pretty quickly and we were quickly impressed with the overall neatness and the always present serenity of the area(as you will know if you read the Nara posts).
All the buildings looked incredibly old (in a cool way). Indeed the area is very old- looks like it was originating in the late 5th century if I read this signpost and cross reference to the emperor mentioned correctly. {Wikipedia has a bit of a deeper analyses on the shrines} The thing that interested me is how neatly the rocks are arranged, you can see in the above picture the contrast between the white and the grey rocks.
Unfortunately the coolest looking places were blocked out. No photographs, and even through the archway, we couldn't see the area to it's fullest extent. The buildings and areas were quite beautiful and thusly even more frustrating that we couldn't see them a little closer.
This day turned out to be the hottest day on record in some cities in Japan (thankfully not in Ise where we were)- it hit 40.9 degrees in Gifu Prefecture. All the same, it was incredibly hot and by time we finished at Geku- we needed to cool off, so we hit this restaurant's tea room for a drink and a dose of air conditioning before moving on to Naiku, the other area.