kyoto

I'm gonna do this now,

my Japanese lesson is finished, my host mother has brought me tea, and its snowing hard outside, (probably the last one of the year) so it's time to fill you in on my adventure to kyoto.

Before we begin I should say I have figured out how to put more than 5 pictures per post, but it is a tedious process, so don't expect massive amounts of pictures, I'll stick to giving you spoonfuls, but I'll try to make them good ones.


DAY 1

I had to wake up so early to get to the airport by rapid train, which is were i met up with all the other exchange students in my district (all four of us) as well as two Japanese girls who went on exchange with our program last year, to America and Australia.

Me and the Australian listened to our Ipods and talked about our towns through the 2 hour flight, and from the Kobe airport we took a monorail through massively industrial Kobe, and Osaka, and finally roll into Kyoto.


We dropped our bags at the hotel and headed for the first of the many temples we would visit; Honganji.
(go to the links for Wikipedia pages with facts like age and purpose and all that)


It was the only place we went that we had a tour in English, but he was not really that good at English and switched over to Japanese about half way through when he found out most of us could understand, leaving the two new Australians completely out of the loop. When the tour was over I left my backpack in the small art gallery beside the actual temple and had to run really fast to go back and get it, but it wasn't so bad because it was where I left it, and it was so much warmer and brighter out than Sapporo had been, and I caught up to everyone else when I got off the Subway.

Here are pictures of us, our guide, and the pigeons just before Jono from Australia ran screaming into the flock.


After the subway, when I was caught up to the group, we walked through this narrow street with all these century-plus Japanese style homes and ended up at Nanzenji, a zen Buddhist temple with a really tall gate, we paid 500 yen to go to the upper level of it and take pictures.







After that we had a walk through the oldest hydroelectric power generator in Japan (I think thats what he said) it was very mossy and cool to see. I don't have any info for you about it, I don't think it was a genuine tourist attraction but just a really nice place to walk through.




when we had done a full circle of the hydro place we walked into a soba (wheat noodle soup) restaurant for dinner. It must have been centuries old, it was unbelievable how much one side of the restaurant was sinking, and the floor was slanted to such a degree that I feared my bowl would slide from the table.

DAY 2

We spent the morning of day 2 walking along some apparently ancient trail through the woods alongside the river, it was really beautiful and there interesting things in terms of abandoned buildings, old style homes, natural features, and dead stuff.

We got to the base of a mountain, and climbed it by stone staircase after stone staircase. At the top was a really beautiful temple called Shingo-ji where we burned incense and prayed to Buddha, then threw clay teacups off a cliff and made wishes. On our way down we had Soba again in a tiny outdoor restaurant on a cliff edge.

After bussing back into the city we visited Ryoanji, a temple with tons of different gardens, and a very famous zen rock garden. From there we went to Kitano tenmangu which was really busy because the cherry blossoms were opening.

This place was really packed but really worth seeing, our trip was a little early for cherry blossoms, but we got to see them here, and pray to a bull to help us succeed in studies, I definitely needed that one. Also a very funny incident involving a girl wearing neon green shorts and an Australian occurred here.

DAY 3

The third day it rained. Personally I like rain when its still a little warm out. We bought umbrellas from a convenience store and went buy bus to Adashino Nembutsudera. It was this place where, from what I understood, they had rebuilt an ancient temple, and in doing so found countless human remains, so they made a grave/shrine honouring the unknown dead, using thousands of different Buddha statues. This place was amazing, I would say it was the best, because everything was dripping wet and mossy and there was no one there but us, and it was not a main tourist site, and everything just felt really old and really significant and I did this ritual where I washed different statues of Buddha with water from this special fountain. There was this amazing photo opportunity but I decided to respect their request for no photography in that particular area.

Still, I got some great pictures there.

Next we went to Nison-in, which is in Arashiyama. We sat barefoot in front of an ancient but well kept zen garden and listened to the rain.

When it wasn't fun to be sitting on hardwood anymore we piled into three taxis and headed off to
Eiga Mura, A working studio where they've filmed most samurai movies and old time Japanese soap operas since the beginning of time. There was a museum devoted to giant rubber monster suits, and a section to power Rangers, which I was surprised to find first aired in Japan in 1979.
Also a haunted house which was fairly well done but the scariest part was when the woman came on the intercom and shouted at us in Japanese every 30 seconds KEEP MOVING, DO NOT STOP. We also watched a "ninja show" with some very serious acting and fighting scenes. The main character seemed to have been dipped in tanning oil immediately before his performance but other than that it was quite acceptable in terms of coordinating sword fights and wild costumes. The oily guy with all the eyeliner came off stage after killing like ten masked ninjas and asked us which countries we came from and then told the crowd through his microphone and told us to please enjoy the show. We were definitely the only foreigners in the audience and older than them by about 10 years as well. I later won a prize at an archery game, spent time talking to drunken men about where I came from (sapporo, not Canada) and how great Kyoto is, and also talking to elementary school kids who had each memorized a very long and polite sentence in English, they asked us what we liked about Japan and were we came from, and they were really confused that we were answering in Japanese. They gave me a hand made thank-you card for helping them with their assignment, that was cool.





After meeting up with the Adults we stopped in a really expensive ice cream shop, and at the end of the street it was on, was Yasaka Jinja. Which despite being built in 656 A.D. is like in the downtown core and beautifully colorful and busy, and the lanterns were all on because the light was fading, I wish we had stayed there longer.

DAY 4



On the fourth day we walked through these really cool really old neighbourhoods and this park that went along the river, and had a few temples in it, the place we were walking to turned out to be Byodouin, which I had heard about previously, because its on the 10 yen coin. It was really the most interestingly located temple we got to see, and the most famous, and there was a museum beside it with a lot of interesting stuff inside. Also there was this 80 year old man (an architect) sitting outside doing a sketch of the temple, he was cool to talk to and was one of the few people I've met who wasn't at all taken aback or even surprised by foreigners understanding/speaking Japanese.

After Byodouin was the Meiji Emperor's tomb (burial mound), which had a huge staircase leading up to it.

We next made a short stop at a place where Iwasn't allowed to take pictures, Sanjusangen-do.
A long building filled form end to end with 1001 human sized multi-armed buddha statues, and a huge one in the middle. I will not forget it as long as I live.

Next we got on a train and went to Nijo-jo, which I had been to once before on my class trip around Japan. It's a really amazing place, emperors lived here, the shogun, famous artists decorated every aspect of it, but they don't allow pictures inside. Here is the outside.

After that we saw very large, very orange Heian jingyu.

and just when I thought we had been to as many temples as a human being can be to in a day, we went to kiyomizudera, a very tall temple built with stacked giant logs rather than nails. I went to kiyomizudera before on my class trip, but I didn't have a chance to drink the water, Ive already forgotten how many times you drink and what each one signifies, but I waited in line and got to do it.

In the area outside of Kiyomizudera we actually ran into what we thought were geisha, but they were just imitation, you can tell right away up close because the one on the right is a relic from the Edo period herself.

No big deal, we had seen a real one the night before.

DAY 5


On the last day we first went to Fushimi Inari Taisha, a shrine to the shinto god Inari, the white fox. This was the coolest place of all. Hardly a shrine, it was entire mountain circled with trails covered by thousands of orange gates one after the other spiraling up it, and hundreds of shrines to different gods or to pray for different things, which I couldn't read.

We spent a lot of time here, because it took a long time to get through, and because it was awesome.

After hiking that so called shrine, we headed for tofuku-ji, which had some great viewpoints from bridges etc, and a rock zen garden that we sat and rested in front of and it made my eyes go weird looking at the patterns raked in the white stones.

From there we headed Back to Kyoto station, and killed time by going up the Kyoto tower, and crossing the sky walk high above the station.

When our train showed up we went back through Osaka and Kobe. The Kobe airport had an open area on the roof and we watched planes land until it was time for ours to leave.

A lot more happened on this trip than I wrote about, but I'm not writing any more. I'm really grateful to the people who organized and helped make this trip happen for us, I love Hokkaido and I love Sapporo, but this island has only been inhabited in recent times, so as much as I experience Japanese modern Culture every day here, I don't have the chance to learn about, our catch a glimpse of what things used to be like in this country.

class trip, kyoto, nara, osaka, tokyo, okinawa.

Although pricey, the class trip was really fantastic. previously I had been to the Tokyo airport for an hour, and then just in Hokkaido doing pretty much zero traveling. Now I've been to most of the most famous places in Japan, all in one week.

I don't even know the names of most the places I went and their was often no English information available. Regardless everything was breathtakingly huge or made of gold or really really ancient. there was a fountain outside one temple that my teacher told me was 1,200 something years old, that's much older than my entire country. It was a little bit surreal being in these places that were of such historical and cultural importance, places kings had lived, battles had been fought...we don't have that so much in Canada.

Once again I regret that there is a 5 pictures per post limit, and I took 500 pictures during the trip.

First we went to Kyoto, I took the train with some friends and we got on the plane together, the first day we saw this really famous ancient temple, part of which was 60 metres tall an built without nails. i was surprised by the amount of foreigners I saw there, I asked a couple if in English if they knew who was ahead in the American election, but they were unfortunately Russian, and very confused.

That night on the news, in Japanese, we found out Obama had won, and we slept on straw mats and hard pillows and got up at 6. the second day in Kyoto was a free day, me and my group must have seen 10 different temples and landmarks that day, we used a map and the bus routes to get around and even saw the old shogun headquarters palace thing, after lunch we got on a train to Osaka, were we saw the famous Osaka castle and had a fantastic dinner.

Day three the class went to Nara, a city outside Kyoto that is most famous for its Edo period style architecture and many important Japanese cultural heritage sites. there were tame deer everywhere that could be hand fed, and one had either been trained to bow at everyone who passed through the temple gates, or had something wrong with its neck.

I should say that in my personal experience Japanese (high school kids at least) like to rush through a museum, aquarium, castle, what have you, as fast as they can so they can buy garbage at the gift shop. Actually maybe its just my group of friends.

That night we flew to Okinawa, When I got off the plane, the air was so hot and wet I thought I would be dead within minutes, but the bus was air conditioned and our massive expensive hotel was as well. There was a fantastic view of the ocean and the beach and I even won the largest bed in the room by Japanese rock paper scissors.

Okinawa is a place I knew little about, it is quite unique from the rest of Japan and I was surprised how dark skinned the people were, being kind of rushed through everything and having very limited reading ability in Japanese, I still knew very little about places we went to after we left. I will include some Wikipedia links to things I've been too at the bottom of this post.

The Castle in Okinawa was being restored, it smelled like wet paint and all the colors were really bright, apparently Americans blew it up in world war 2 and they've been putting it back together from photographs and memory since the early 90's.

It was pretty awesome to see but there was a kind of falseness to a lot of stuff there.

the aquarium in Okinawa was really cool, there were animals I'd never seen, including whale sharks and manta rays. The tank for them was so huge. We went snorkeling after the aquarium and I saw a lot of the things I'd just seen in the aquarium but now in their natural state. I feel i should add that all the coral was gray and dead and I had the feeling the exotic fish were only surviving there still because of the bread given to them by tourists every day. I am a much stronger swimmer than my classmates, and a lot of them cant actually swim at all, i did not expect that. I've never been anywhere tropical before, and that day was really a lot of fun.

The next day we climbed down into a cave that had been used as a shelter in the battle of Okinawa, the guide told an hour long story in Japanese as everyone huddled together in the dark, I'm sure it must have been a pretty interesting story, but all I understood was to watch my head, and that many many people had died there.

That night we flew to Tokyo, driving through there at night was pretty breathtaking, I'm sure you've seen pictures of Tokyo at night, but going through it is something entirely different, there were so many raised highways I don't think we touched the ground once from the airport to the hotel, it made me think of the Jetson's a little. We ate a buffet style dinner in a hall with a view of both the downtown and the harbour.

The next day was Tokyo Disneyland, it was so busy we only got to go on two rides. one was a mistake, it had the shortest line but turned out to be a slow train ride through a very crummy old west, which included extremely red faced native Americans moving robotically and living in a bamboo forest. the other ride was an hour and a half line up, but by far the greatest roller coaster I've ever been on, and almost entirely in the pitch dark, it was called space mountain and was beyond illin. Again they spent massive amounts of money on massive amounts of junky Disney memorabilia. there are other places I would like to have seen in Tokyo, but this was a really fun day with my friends regardless of the waiting and crummyness and disneyness, and that roller coaster was honestly almost as good as Obama winning the American election on Japanese TV in the hotel room. those are two things I shall not soon forget.


I've taught English in a few times to a few classes, I enjoy it and it goes over well, but I think I taught the most English on this trip, and learned more Japanese, but also more about Japanese people, and feel a lot closer with my classmates.

thank you to my parents for their massive contribution, and thank you to superstore for the tiny paychecks that made up the rest.





Here are some wiki links to places I went.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todai-ji


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinkaku-ji


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiyomizu-dera


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_Castle


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryoanji


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nijo_castle


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_Aquarium


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuri-jo

this is just what I could find from names on ticket stubs and pictures I recognize in my book.

Thanks to anyone who reads,

and you don't have to sign up with this website or anything to comment on my posts, I appreciate knowing you're reading, and having your input and criticism.

Alex,

student abroad