Uni week, Kyoto and Lots of Rain

Something both fortunate and unfortunate about Japanese culture affected me on Friday.

UNfortunately, japanese women generally have really small feet.
So when my old sandals snapped at school, and the selotape kept coming off them because of the rain, I was faced with either going the hour and a bit journey home bare footed or else taking up a sensei's offer of borrowing her shoes. So, I had her shoes cutting into the flesh of my toes (and the painful blisters to prove it).

Fortunately, however, the roads around where I live are really clean (like most of Japan). So when I gave up on the torture of the sandles and walked bare foot home after all, it wasn't so bad. I got a few funny looks, but they probabily just thought it was something foreigners do. Discard our shoes in rainy weather ~

I took some pictures of my area when I went wondering around the other day, in case you were interested in the path I walked home with no shoes on.

It's rained quite a lot since then, so I guess autumn is on it's way? It's still too hot for jeans or even tights, but the heat is not as crushing as before.

Concerning the last week, well, it's been a school week, as in nothing new or exciting. Got a softbank mobile, feels good to have contact with people again. Classes are all in Japanese. Host family still being their awesome selves, Tokishi is yet to so much as frown every time I see him ~ and the food they are feeding me is getting more and more Japanese. I had udon with tofu for breakfast, and today I had some spear fish and onigiri (riceballs).

The english people they've hosted before me apparently didn't like japanese food o_0 so i've been compensating for that by eating EVERYTHING they give me (not hard actually) and making it clear that it is delicious. Which it is.

Went to Kyoto to visit Calyx on her birthday and had a great time, saw some amazing shrines and castles. Kyoto is very beautiful and more traditionally Japanese than Kobe, probably because it used to be the capital in Japan before it moved to Edo, modern day Tokyo. But still castles and shrines that were occupied by Shoguns and buddists remain.

Got to witness a traditional japanese wedding ceremony at a shino shrine! Whoo!

The gates to the shrines. Free entry for the win.

Purification before entry into the shrines

Ring bell, clap twice, pray to the shinto gods ~

I felt no guilt in praying to the Shinto gods when I wasn't strictly shinto because a lot of Japanese people are like that. There's a saying, that a japanese person is 'born shinto, marries christian and dies buddist'. Whatever takes their fancy I guess ~

We went to the most popular tourist attraction, the KinKokuji (golden pavilion). Built in the 1600's for the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa (wiki him) as a pleasure house and then made into a temple by his son (haha), it's a temple covered with gold leaf. A buddist monk accidently knocked over a lamp and burnt some of it 60 years ago, which is how things went a lot of the time with the wooden structures back in the day, but it's beautiful to see.

Apparently it's stunning in the snow of winter and the cherry blossoms in spring, too.

My favourate was Ninomaru Castle, the interior of which was absolutely gorgeous (and smelt really good, a fresh woody smell despite it's age). The art on the walls, ceilings and screens had a lot of symbolism to them that Calyx, having already had a guided tour before, enlightened me on. Like the armoury had hawks on the walls, the hunting bird - and the paisey flowers representing royalty. The shogun had a floor that creaked and made squeaking noises on purpose so that he wouldn't be assassinated by ninjas in his sleep. He called it the 'Nightangle Floor'.

No photos were allowed on the inside to preserve the centuaries old paintings, so here's some of in and around the castle grounds instead:

We walked around a lot, ate, went shopping, and I slept at her dorms for the night. We'd spent a lot of time in a keyring store looking at our fav. characters and a korean pretty boy random stuff store:

Characters popularity are made clear by the price discrepency between them. It was fun looking for them.

 Met up with Amanda who had lost her iPhone within 24 hours of getting it in Kyoto (ouch T-T) and marveled at Calyx's brown tap water. Got up at 6AM Sunday next day (lots of people around) to come home, then left again for another rendezvous.

Met up with friends from Leeds in Sannomiya and had some good times ~

engrish

torii gate, the shinto passage between this world and the next

I'm easily amused..

This week is going to be packed too, I can tell, with a Noh play, Paul's birthday in Kobe, having an interview with the art club sensei (why, though?) and field tripping to a buddist temple over the weekend.

I still haven't gotten my head around everything tbh. I'm just going with the flow.

Thank god the trains are so simple to use  ~

More photos of this weekend are on my facebook.

And Gabrielle, this one's for you ^^: