Whoops. Posting didn't really happen on this thing. Alas. Class has been good for the most part. It's kinda tough but its really interesting and it seems like it's worth the effort I'm putting in. The other people in the program have proven to be fairly cool, with only a handful of exceptions. Anyway, I just got back from Nara today. It was a lot of fun, but it was absurdly hot there. Like both days, it had to have been in the 90s with maybe 40 or 50% humidity. And it was supposed to rain today! Yesterday, I went into Nara and went to a temple with a big pagoda and lots of deer. Deer are kind of the thing in Nara. They're almost everywhere. I remember hearing things to the effect that they're really aggressive, but mostly they just seemed content to laze around and only really bothered you if you seemed to obviously have food. Maybe it was the heat. After that, we went to dinner with the entire program and it was really tasty. There were various things of Japanese origin including but not limited to two kinds of soup, sashimi, some cooked salmon and rice. Almost all of them were tasty. I'm still not entirely sure what some of them were, though. After that, me and some other people in the program wandered around for a while trying to find this hill with a good view we were told about. It didn't seem to be where we thought. The guy who told us about the hill also told us that there were lots of fireflies behind this one big temple, and we tried to go there, but couldn't seem to figure that out either. Eventually we did find two fireflies or so, so I guess that counts as a success somehow. Then we walked back and I stayed up longer than I had any reason to and then went to sleep.
Today we had a breakfast viking (buffet, which for some incredibly awesome reason is called viking in Japanese), and then we went off to more temples. At the first one (Yakushiji), there was apparently this big ceremony going on because they were going to cover and restore some of the pagodas there. It was really pretty, but the tone of the ceremony combined with a relatively serious conversation about religion beforehand gave me a pretty strong sense that I wasn't supposed to be there. After that, we were planning on going to Houryuuji (another temple), but one guy confidently got off at the wrong stop and we all followed him, and since the next bus wasn't for another hour, we decided to go to another temple at that stop called Houkiji. Apparently it dates to like the Asuka period (which, without really knowing, I'll say is like the 600s or so AD), and is a UNESCO world heritage site. It's also been a subordinate temple or something to Houryuuji at various points in history. After that, we were all really tired, so we just decided to go back to Nara. Before that however, we found this roadside fruit shop that was selling big bags of frozen strawberries for like 400 yen. It was absurdly hot so three or four of us got one and ate them on the bus. However, since the bags were a bit big for one sitting, just about all of us ended up having too many, and they got melty and mushy by the time we actually arrived back in the area by our hotel and we had to throw them away. I'm almost 100% certain that that was a run on sentence. At the place we decided to eat lunch (it was like 3:00 by then, so we were all really hungry). It just so happened that there was a mini-concert at the cafe we were eating at right when we were there of this group of women playing Pianocos (or something), which were basically hand held pianos that were played by blowing into them and fingering the keys. It was kind of cool, but not mind blowingly awesome. Then we went back to the hotel, killed some time, and got on a train back to Kyoto.
Once I got back, I realized that I was about 15 or 20 minutes for dinner, which was kind of frustrating, since I didn't realize until it was too late to contact my host mom as I'm supposed to. So I felt kind of bad about that. I did meet another one of my host brothers at dinner, who is apparently in town because he is doing some sort of a rally race or something. He's the middle child who works for a car company as an engineer or something. He didn't really talk much, so I don't have much of an opinion on him. He seemed cool enough, though. Since then, I've been lazing around my room since I'm really tired. Tomorrow I'm sure that work will get done because it must. Maybe I'll post more in the future. Whoops.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Driving around and stuff
So my host brother is gone. That's kind of sad, because he seemed cool. Hopefully I'll be able to run into him if I'm in Tokyo at some point or whatever. After that, my host mom drover me around to various places so I could kind of get a sense of how Kyoto is laid out. I think I won't get lost and die now...hopefully. Oh, yeah, the title means "you don't use ookini!?!" Ookini is a word for thank you that I'm told is used in the Kansai region (where Kyoto is), but apparently, according to my host brother, isn't actually used in most contexts. So there goes 1/3 of the things I knew about Kansai-ben. Also, while I was out, I got a prepaid card for a phone. Luckily, my host family already had a phone I could use left over from one of their previous homestay kids, so I can use that. The only thing is that I have absolutely no idea how to make it work with the phone. Oh well, hopefully I can figure it out. In fact, that's what I'm gonna do right about now. So yeah. Toodles.
Arrival
So yeah. This thing exists. I think I plan on changing the title if I feel like it some time later on. Anyway, here's what I got up to today.
I had a decent flight out to Japan (as decent as a 11 and a half hour flight can be). I read a lot and I watched a movie and slept. Once I got in, I ended up having a touch of trouble with my visa, but after I explained things, I pretty much just had to wait for 10 minutes or so before they came back and told me everything was fine. While I was waiting, I met an expat named Brent (I think), who was also having visa issues, but he also had a very adorable daughter, who kind of reminded me of Alex. At one point, she was holding her nose saying how badly her dad smelled, and then she started scooting away from him, ending up in the opposite corner of the room. Then, once that was over, I got out, went through customs with no real issues, and changed my money over, also with no issues. Next, however, it seemed like I couldn't find my shuttle, which was very stressful. I walked around for a while, but to no avail. Eventually, I found someone with a sign from the same company, but with a different name on it, so I asked them what to do. They told me to go to the "number one over there" counter and ask them. I walked over, and, true to his word, it was indeed the farthest away (I had gotten kind of nervous after a while). Right as I was walking over, someone came up to me and asked if I was Whitney, and then it all worked out from there. It turned out that Brent and his daughter were on my shuttle, but, also interestingly, someone else from my program was on it sitting next to me. I forgot her name already (oops), but she was very nice. Apparently her dad's side of the family is from Japan, and she goes to Yale. She's in the Advanced Japanese portion of the program, which makes her less cool than me, though. After what seemed like a long shuttle ride (only made longer by the fact that I needed to go to the bathroom), I arrived at my host family's house. My host mother greeted me and showed me around the house. Once I had put my bags up in my room, I went down and had tea with my host mother and father and their youngest son Takuya. Apparently he was visiting because he had to go to a friends wedding, but he's a photographer who lives in Tokyo. After we talked for a while, they let me go up to unpack my things a bit before dinner. On my way down, I gave the parents the crab doilies and Takuya the Ravens playing cards. They seemed interested in what the crab and raven meant, or at least we had a pretty long conversation about each. Apparently Japanese doesn't have a word for raven, or at least it isn't well known. It's something like watarigarasu, which is some variation on the word for crow, which is karasu. I also learned what that crow-like-thing with three feet on the Japanese national soccer team's uniforms is. Apparently it's a yatogarasu, which is another kind of crow in Japanese mythology and a symbol of Japan. So far my Japanese seems to be holding up ok, and I don't feel like there have been any moments when people were talking to me that I really couldn't understand them, so that's good. I think the worst language-related mishap I had was when I confused the words for five and eight when the shuttle driver told me how much to pay him, but that didn't really cause much of an issue.
I had a decent flight out to Japan (as decent as a 11 and a half hour flight can be). I read a lot and I watched a movie and slept. Once I got in, I ended up having a touch of trouble with my visa, but after I explained things, I pretty much just had to wait for 10 minutes or so before they came back and told me everything was fine. While I was waiting, I met an expat named Brent (I think), who was also having visa issues, but he also had a very adorable daughter, who kind of reminded me of Alex. At one point, she was holding her nose saying how badly her dad smelled, and then she started scooting away from him, ending up in the opposite corner of the room. Then, once that was over, I got out, went through customs with no real issues, and changed my money over, also with no issues. Next, however, it seemed like I couldn't find my shuttle, which was very stressful. I walked around for a while, but to no avail. Eventually, I found someone with a sign from the same company, but with a different name on it, so I asked them what to do. They told me to go to the "number one over there" counter and ask them. I walked over, and, true to his word, it was indeed the farthest away (I had gotten kind of nervous after a while). Right as I was walking over, someone came up to me and asked if I was Whitney, and then it all worked out from there. It turned out that Brent and his daughter were on my shuttle, but, also interestingly, someone else from my program was on it sitting next to me. I forgot her name already (oops), but she was very nice. Apparently her dad's side of the family is from Japan, and she goes to Yale. She's in the Advanced Japanese portion of the program, which makes her less cool than me, though. After what seemed like a long shuttle ride (only made longer by the fact that I needed to go to the bathroom), I arrived at my host family's house. My host mother greeted me and showed me around the house. Once I had put my bags up in my room, I went down and had tea with my host mother and father and their youngest son Takuya. Apparently he was visiting because he had to go to a friends wedding, but he's a photographer who lives in Tokyo. After we talked for a while, they let me go up to unpack my things a bit before dinner. On my way down, I gave the parents the crab doilies and Takuya the Ravens playing cards. They seemed interested in what the crab and raven meant, or at least we had a pretty long conversation about each. Apparently Japanese doesn't have a word for raven, or at least it isn't well known. It's something like watarigarasu, which is some variation on the word for crow, which is karasu. I also learned what that crow-like-thing with three feet on the Japanese national soccer team's uniforms is. Apparently it's a yatogarasu, which is another kind of crow in Japanese mythology and a symbol of Japan. So far my Japanese seems to be holding up ok, and I don't feel like there have been any moments when people were talking to me that I really couldn't understand them, so that's good. I think the worst language-related mishap I had was when I confused the words for five and eight when the shuttle driver told me how much to pay him, but that didn't really cause much of an issue.
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