 |
|||||||||||||
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||||
Kyoto + Kuzuha: September 26, Friday Japanese class was whatever. I hurried off to Yawata (the city I live in in Kyoto) to apply for national health insurance, because I'm required to. That was a confusing process, because the guy who was signing me up spoke no English, and kept using very technical words, so I couldn't tell what the eff he was talking about. I decided to just go with it and talk to the school on Monday. Afterward, Huey and I met up and went to Kuzuha Mall. We browsed a bunch of the shops and waffled on buying/not buying things (in the end, I bought a little notebook with a deer on it, to take to Nara, and she bought a bunch of clothes at UniQlo. In her defense, most of them were for her friend, who is paying her back, and only one is for herself). We ate super delicious crêpes that were amazingly cheap for how good they were, then went to UniQlo after that, hurried off home for dinner. At UniQlo, I got a text from Dr. Jeffry Hester, a gender studies instructor whose classes I wanted to take, but I'd been warned that his teaching style was very dry, and primarily statistics-based. I'd been directed by Dr. Fedorowicz to talk to him about how I might be able to purchase tickets to go and see the Takarazuka Revue (click here to learn more about the Takarazuka Revue). He mentioned that his class was going on a field trip to see the Takarazuka Revue on October 5th, and when I asked if I could maybe possibly piggyback onto that trip, he said that it depended on if all of his students were going, as the school pre-bought tickets. If one of them wasn't going, or didn't pay, he would have room for me to go in their place. And the tickets were only 2500 yen ($23.48 USD)! Holy WOW, that's cheap! (But I'm sure transportation will make up for it.) Anyway, the text message was to tell me that I was in. So I'm going to go to Takarazuka next Sunday! I'm so psyched! For the rest of the evening, I played Pokémon Pearl and Huey tried to knit. Her youngest host brother screwed it up, though, by yanking out the needle. Apparently, something either unraveled or got knotted, but one way or another, she ended up having to cut the yarn and start over. Kiyomizudera in Kyoto: September 27, Saturday I woke up and ran off to Y's Café for breakfast. Then I went to catch the train. I was going to be super early, though-- a combination of I was early and Huey was late-- so I took zillion photos of a bridge and river I walk past every day. We met up and went to Kiyomizu Temple. We went in and got some niiice views, and took a bunch more pictures. Then... we realized that there was a way to just cut in without having to pay, because the exit was wide open. What the heck? So Huey was fuming about that. XD On the way down, we had a bunch of various food samples-- Huey more than me, as she was hellbent on eating back the 300 yen entrance fee. We went to a few other places on accident-- we were trying for a garden, but somehow COMPLETELY bypassed it and ended up by Ryozen something-something, or Ryozen Cemetary, which was completely worth its meager entrance fee of another 300 yen. Some of the steps were freaking scary, though. I'm okay going up stairs, but I am AWFUL coming down them. @_@ As we left, we went to a rest area so Huey could go to the bathroom and I could snack-- and there was a gigantic Buddha statue there. O_o; I mean, gigantic: its height was easily several bus-lengths. (And that's not even the biggest Buddha statue here!) Then we ended up stumbling upon another graveyard... but this one was. Wow. Insanely enormous. I'll post some photos once I get them uploaded. It was quite insane. And the view was insane, too! It was just a gigantic sea of Buddhist graves, that went up high into the mountains. And, morbidly enough, there were crows everywhere. The higher we went, the more crows there were, perching on tombstones or flying from perch to perch, cawing in a range of pitches that sometimes sounded like a human voice. We headed down at 5:15 and were greeted by a quiet, polite security guard who had just been silently waiting for us. Apparently, the graveyard closed at 5. Oops. But he hadn't told us off or anything-- he just waited for us to finish, and escorted us out, because the main gates were locked. How polite! And then we headed home. Nara: September 28, Sunday The day of transportation h-e-double-hockey-sticks. Nah, I'm exaggerating. But it was a pain. Huey and I took the Keihan Line to Kyobashi, where we had to switch to the subway (340 yen, or $3.19 USD). We took the subway from Kyobashi to Shinsaibashi on the Nagahori Tsurumi-Ryokuchi Line, then transferred to Namba on the Yotsubashi Line (230 yen, or about $2.16 USD). Then we had to get onto the JR Line (Japanese Railway) from Namba to Nara (540 yen, or $5.07 USD). Anyway. We arrived, then were walking up to Kofukuji Temple (which has a five-story pagoda) when we kept running into stores with clothes on sale, and souvenir trinkets. So I bought a couple of things because really-- it's Nara-- how could I not?? The Temple was cool, and we did see two deer, but then there was nothing for a while as we walked along toward the Nara National Museum. And then, the deer came. So! Many! Deer! It was awesome! And they were SO tame! We could just go right up to them and pet them and they'd just put up with it-- headbutt us to see if we had food, maybe, or sniff at our clothes, but they were so tame! So we took a LOT of photos of deer. (A little more on deer later.) We went past Nara National Museum and reached the Todaiji Temple, which housed the Daibutsuden-- the largest Buddha in Japan, if Huey told me correctly. There were some lovely sights but to actually get in and see the Buddha itself, you had to pay, and Huey-- who was the one who most wanted to see the Daibutsuden-- didn't want to pay. XD So we just observed from the outside, then moved on to Nigatsu-dou, another temple. We walked past the Silk Road Exchange Hall and wandered out of Nandaimon (Great South Gate) where we found a table and benches and sat down to rest. (Now the deer.) So, this male deer came up to us-- a young one that still had some of its spots faintly. At first it was just sniffing at us, and we kept our everything out of its way... And then its teeth caught onto our map, which was in Huey's hand. And it started chewing on our map. We-- mostly Huey, as the deer was facing her-- tugged at it several times to try to get it back, but it had been folded up into quarters so it was risky to keep our fingers too close to its mouth because they do bite. But to no avail: it wouldn't give back the map. So we helplessly watched as the darn deer ate our map. On the one hand-- what the heck?!?!?! On the other hand, it was so hilarious. No wonder the kanji for the Japanese word for "stupid" contains the characters for "deer" and "horse." So after that encounter with the stupid map-eating deer, we headed home.
|
| © 2002-2008. Blurty Journal. All rights reserved. |