Coincidence or a joke from the gods. Kyoto, Japan.

Kyoto is the heart of traditional Japan. Here we can fill the extraordinary taste of Japan, even in the right sense of the word! The food is excellent. In the city of Kyoto, we can rest in the shade of Buddhist temples that have stood for over a thousand years, hanging around in the streets marked by the traditions of times, visit the old samurai castles, or just peruse the offerings of the ultramodern department stores. You can join in the time-honored tea ceremony in one of the tradition gardens or unwind with a cup of coffee at a fashionable café downtown. But the idea that only in Kyoto is it possible to cross paths with a real geisha as you stop for a snack at a convenient store is not absolutely true. Let’s go back for my first days in Japan… The second day in Tokyo wakes up with rain and from the top of my hotel room, I realize a grey and sad Tokyo. Definitely this was not a good day for a walk in the city. At eleven o’clock in the morning, I was brave enough to leave the hotel and face the day with my camera in the box, thinking…today is a bad day for photographs even with the cherry blossoms. I took the direction of Shinagawa train station to catch the JR Yamanote Line, the circular Tokyo line. The imaginable happens! At the entrance of the train station, two beautiful geishas (in fact a geisha and a maiko, a geisha apprentice, as I learned afterwards) where there standing, waiting for a taxi and for my shot. It was like a miracle. But the best is yet to come. After two weeks of traveling in Japan I arrive to Kyoto, and like all travelers, even with my Tokyo geishas in my computer, I had the expectation of seeing and photograph a few more. I did. What I didn’t expect was seeing the same girl I saw in Tokyo at the Shinagawa train station in that raining day. This photo is this special moment. For a country with 128 millions of inhabitants (343 for each km2) it is something unreal. Like a friend of my used to say, just a coincidence or a joke from the gods.