University Life Thus Far...

So, I did actually find my way to I-House, with some help from a student and staff member who knew very little English...Well, it probably would have been easier if they could have just pointed which way down the road it was, but they took me to an info center to look at a map, and the student actually walked me all the way to the doors of I-House. But that's the Japanese for you: you ask a simple question, and if the answer isn't completely ambiguous (in the case of many opinion questions), then it's unnecessarily complicated. It was still very nice of them, but I felt a little bad for putting them so out of their way.
And now, I will sum up my first, hm, about two weeks here at the I-House in one post! Here it goes...

Here's a photo which pretty much sums up the mercurial weather in Kyoto, quite beautifully, if I do say so myself. (I took this picture from my balcony, by the way. The sakura tree blocks the boys' dormitory across the little road quite nicely.) I'm happy to report that the sakura endured the brief on and off snowing we had a couple of days last week. This week was quite warm by contrast.

 

The I-House is just down the street from the university--it's about a 10 minute walk to campus. We're set up in the hills in the north, right next to the mountainy wilderness which surrounds Kyoto. Pretty much right in the wilderness actually--we'll address that further later, I think. As previously mentioned, there's a karaoke place called the Operetta really close by, and a Circle K konbini just down the street in the other direction. We have to pay our rent at the konbini, by the way, but any konbini in the country will do. 

I-house is full of cool people, both Japanese and exchange students. We have people from a good number of countries: several girls from South Korea, quite  a few people from France, Germany, Poland, China, a couple of people from Italy, Iceland, Poland, Taiwan, Finland, Canada, and one each from the UK, Ireland, Russia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico. Out of the 5 students from America, 4 of us are from the same university, and the other is from Cali. Speaking of Elliot, he moved in on his birthday, which the residents of I-house saw as a good excuse for a nomikai. I'm not entirely sure if it counts as a nomikai, but that's what everyone calls them when people get together as a large group to talk, snack, and drink. It's not a crazy '80s movie party by any means (and is very tame by comparison), and not everyone even drinks at a nomikai.

The first outing I had with a group from I-House was to Teramachi-dori, a street/shopping district between Shijo-dori and Sanjo-dori (streets.) We wandered down the street, stopped in a couple of the shops, at a Mister Donut, and store that was rather like a Japanese version of World Market. Shoe stores in Japan are ridiculous: the prices and the shoes. The shoes range from cute, to neon, to absolutely gaudy, in both men and women's styles. I'm only a U.S. size 8 (sometimes 7 1/2 or 8 1/2), but here I'm something like a 25, which is on the upper end of women's shoe sizes. A lot of foreigners or exchange students who come here simply can't fit in the clothes or shoes they sell, especially men. It's very surreal, to walk in a crowd and feel like an Amazon compared to the women around you--I'm at the solid average American height of 5'4". Not that tall.

 

 

 

 

 

It's claws moved...

One day last week, when the weather was finally nice--I think it might have been Thursday or Friday--some of us took a trip to Fresco, the nearest supermarket, to pick up some snacks before sitting by the Kamogawa river to enjoy the sakura. Mini-hanami, I'd say. Walking along Kamogawa, you're certain to see a couple of herons, definitely mallards and other types of ducks (Kamogawa's name consists the kanji for "duck" and "river"), and probably some small skimmer-fishing birds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the Japanese students in I-House took a bunch of us to each okonomiyaki, which is kind of like very large pancake-omelette hybrid with everything in it. Ok, not everything, but egg, cabbage, onions, meat--ours was pork--and various other veggies. Okonomiyaki was delicious, but the yakisoba was incredible. Karaoke that night too--fun, fun, fun...

~~~

Engrish of the Day:

 

Mocca: be your happiness with the flower

There and Back Again

Sunday morning the guesthouse manager loaded our luggage in his very spiffy compact van and drove us to Kitaoji Eki. We thanked him for all his help and kindness--he had helped us book a hotel for that time, and by helped, I mean he pretty much did all the work--and then we said goodbye. This time we took the right train from the Kyoto Eki to Kansai International Airport, unlike when we came to Kyoto, and took a taxi to our hotel. The drive didn't take that long from the airport to the hotel, but it was still a bit expensive; the trip was deceptively short due to the long, long bridge from the airport to Osaka-proper.

We mostly rested at the hotel, although we went to check out the mall right down the road. I don't think you see too much in the way of malls here--at least, not like those in America. Japan tends to build up, not out and across. Still, this one wasn't unlike an American mall: a couple of floors, but decently sized in the horizontal direction. I tried curry for the first time at dinner, which really reminds me of Cincinnati chili for some reason. I suppose it's the combination of sweet and spicy. Anyways, it's definitely a new favorite. The mall had a slightly different collection of stores than you might expect at a mall. Clothing stores of course, but there was also a hyaku-en shop, a dollar store basically, a grocery store, and a jewelry-crafting shop. I couldn't understand any of the people in Osaka though...I suppose they were all speaking Osaka-ban, their dialect, though.
After dinner, we watched some more crazy Japanese tv that evening, tail end of a sumo tournament and an obstacle course game show, and went to bed early--needed to be up at 3 in the morning to be ready to call a taxi to go to the airport at 4. We managed to get up early enough, got to the airport in more than plenty of time. (KIX does not open at 4 am, like we were told, but at 5. So there was quite a bit of waiting, but at least we weren't running late.) So, I saw Robert and Gerry off at the airport--my goodbyes were not manly and tearless--and managed to make back to Kyoto Eki, then Kitaoji Eki, and then to the bus stop in front of the university.
Then I realized I didn't know which way to go to get to the I-house.

Day 7: Gion, Take 3. Third time's a charm.

So, after a stop at Starbucks, Robert and I finally made a real trip to Gion.
Ordered my usual chai latte, which tastes exactly the same as it does in America. Robert had a sakura frappachino and a sakura steamed bun--the latter with a pickled cherry blossom--both of which turned out to be quite delish. The bun had matcha filling near the bottom as well...Back home at Starbucks, and most other coffee shops, when autumn comes around, the seasonal flavor is pumpkin. Here, in spring, it's sakura.


We started where we'd been before in Gion, at Yasaka-jinja and Maruyama-kouen. The weather was much more amiable this time around: it was a beautiful, cool, sunny day, and there were a number of new and interesting sights that day.

So it turned out there was a market in Gion that Saturday, with a good number of the same vendors we saw at the other fairs. I'm not sure if it's the same deal where they all show up at Yasaka-jinja on a certain day of the month. I have a feeling it had more to do with it being the first Saturday people were going out to hanami. Up in Maruyama-kouen, people were setting out tarps, already having their bento pre-lunchtime.

 A game at one of the little vendors (photo courtesy of Robert)

 

The shidare-zakura, once again, with feeling

We wandered through Maruyama-kouen again, ventured up to a couple of temples in the hills where people were paying their respects. Some kind of religious service was going on in one of the buildings...We also walked by a couple of graveyards. They're not at all like Western graveyards--if that fact was not already previously established by the discovery of a Hello Kitty tombstone. I think they are made out of the same kind of stone as Western tombstones, but Japanese gravestones are typically taller and thinner. Also, these graveyards were set on a hill, so each row going back is slightly more elevated than the one before it. Some areas of the graveyard even look like all the headstones are exactly the same--and perhaps that wasn't just my imagination.

 A sight I found rather wabi-sabi...

 Looking out at the city from a very quiet, peaceful temple where I had my nokyo-cho signed...

We took a long stroll back through the park, and made our way past a shrine, a small park, and another graveyard up to another small temple. Unfortunately, no one seemed to be at this second temple, but we did discover that it was devoted to a goddess of music. (I seem to be having a bit of trouble actually finding the names of these couple of temples, but I'll probably return to the area at some point and check; it's such a gorgeous area to wander around in for hours.)

The ravens here are very large and quite amusing. They sound a little strange--very different from American crows.










Their noises are a bit more like people when they caw too, kind of like Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing.

 A small Buddhist meditation we passed walking around--they picked the perfect day, too

 A closer look at the graves on the path up towards the temple devoted to the music goddess

 

The amazing view from atop the graveyard towards the city again...

 Back through the park again...

As we walked back through Yasaka-Jinja, we realized something was about to happen when we saw two miko making preparations. The other big hints were the guys in suits who were clearly shouting at the crowds of people to stand to the sides of the pathways because people were about to come through.

We were so lucky just to happen by a Shinto wedding procession.

I think most of the people there didn't know to expect a wedding that day (and we weren't the only tourists stopping to take photos of the event.) Once it looked like the actual ceremony was starting, we meandered back down towards the main road, out of the shrine, to stroll down Gion's shopping streets. We passed a number of very interesting shops.

The first was a gemstone /mineral shop, with both raw and carved specimans, jewelry, and even small statuettes. Robert bought a pair of little black maneki neko, one for happiness, and one for money. Black maneki neko are conveniently also talismans against evil.

We turned down a smaller side street, walked down and back, and stopped in a couple of other little places carrying things like stationary, traditional handicrafts, textiles, even a store specializing in indigo-dyed goods. The aizome goods in that last store were very, very expensive.

After that amazing and gorgeous exploration of the Gion area, Robert went to go meet Ben for the aforementioned dinner with various Judo masters and practitioners, and I stayed near the Shijo-Karasuma subway station and looking for a bookstore I'd seen nearby one night. I wandered down all 4 arms of the intersection for a ways, searching for something familiar--anything that looked like what we'd passed a few nights earlier. Eventually I asked a couple of people, and the second young woman actually walked me to the nearest bookstore, which was quite close by and above a Tommy Hilfiger shop. She was very kind to go out of her way, even a little bit, to show me, I thought.

And then I wandered around some more--inside the bookstore, this time. I still don't really understand how they shelve the books in Japan. They do group them by genre and type, but as far as I can tell, there's no "alphabetical" (or phonetically, in the case of Japanese) organization that I can ever see. I walked through the shelves of manga, seeing what I could read of the katakana. And I looked and looked around in the fiction for Harry Potter. Again, after a while, I acknowledged defeat and asked a store clerk. Turns out all the Harry Potter books are in the children's section...even though I'd argue the books are age-appropriate according to the ages of the characters throughout the series, pretty much. I decided on buying Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Japanese, since it was the cheapest of the hardbacks, and all the paperbacks had abstract and non-illustrative covers. So I believe that makes 3 Harry Potter books we have in different languages (excluding English): the first in Japanese, the third in Spanish, and the fourth in Swedish.
Mission complete: Buy a Harry Potter book in 日本語.

Thoroughly satisfied, I headed back to the guesthouse for what I thought was some well-deserved rest for the rest of the evening. A few of hours later I get an email from Ben telling me he hoped my stuff was packed. About 20 minutes later Ben and Robert showed up with a taxi; we needed to drop most of my luggage off at the International House that night, since we were going to be leaving for Osaka the next day and Ben would be busy. Luckily I was pretty much all packed up, except for a couple of things I'd set aside for what was essentially a day trip for me. We carefully, carefully, got my huge violet suitcase down the steep stairs, easily took down the duffel bag, tossed them in the taxi trunk, and hopped in. We got everything over alright, the taxi cab driver was very nice and chatted with us a little, left my luggage just inside the building, and headed back to the nearest subway station. The guys said their tearless, manly goodbyes, and we returned to the guesthouse, finished packing, and retired.