There's a version of Kyoto that exists for people with four days and a list. Kinkaku-ji in the morning, Fushimi Inari at golden hour, a kaiseki dinner squeezed in before the last train. It's a perfectly good four days. It is also, we'd argue, not really Kyoto.
Given two weeks — which is what we'd actually book, given the choice — the city opens differently. The first three days go to nothing in particular: a neighborhood, a bicycle, a coffee shop you return to twice because the owner remembered your order. Temple fatigue is real, and the cure for it isn't seeing fewer temples. It's seeing them slower, with gaps in between wide enough to actually notice something.
Week two is when we'd send you north, into the Kitayama mountains, for two nights at a ryokan with a rotenburo and no wifi worth mentioning. You come back to the city with a different relationship to its noise.
The famous gates are still worth it. Go at 6am, alone, before the tour buses. But build the trip around the mornings you don't plan at all — that's usually where the actual memory ends up living.
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