Oops

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.