Kyoto for The Slow Weekenders: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

A temple that was a palace, with giant camphor trees at the gate and a moss garden you sit above on tatami with the sliding doors open; nobody hurries you.

Afternoon tea in a 1909 tobacco baron's villa, rococo rooms and a Japanese wing, taken slowly on the velvet with the park going quiet outside.

The Kikunoi family's smaller house on Kiyamachi: a shorter kaiseki at a counter over the canal, easier to book than the main house and over by nine.

A 1923 neighbourhood bath with carved cedar transoms over the changing room, a cypress tub, a cold plunge and a garden tub; the whole morning for the price of a coffee.

The tofu maker's own restaurant across from the shrine: a set of fried tofu in dashi, yuba and rice, in the queue with the neighbourhood by noon.

Fifteen stones in raked gravel, and a veranda to sit on until you have stopped counting them; the pond garden below is the part most people skip.

An hour north by bus to a village of pickle shops and the moss garden of Sanzen-in, where small stone Jizō peer out of the moss and the cedars drip.

A long lunch of river fish, mountain vegetables and Ōhara's shibazuke pickles on tatami by the stream, the valley's one restaurant with its own garden.

The 700-year-old pine framed by the pillars of the reception room like a painting, with matcha and a sweet included in the ticket; sit as long as you like.

The Leaping Tiger garden of the abbot's quarters, a dry garden against a white wall, and the Kanō-school screens of tigers drinking in a bamboo grove.

A statesman's 1896 villa garden with a stream fed by the Biwa canal, the borrowed hills of Higashiyama, and a tea room where the Russo-Japanese war was planned.

Yudofu, tofu simmered in kelp broth and eaten with soy and spring onion, in a 1635 house with a garden on three sides; the last slow lunch before the airport.