Updating!!

Considering it's the end of November now, I'm kind of not hopeful about catching up on October.  >.>  At least I got an overview of things up....anyways! 

The new exciting thing right now is that I just got back from a week in Tokyo!  Which was fall break.  We went to lots of places and did lots of things.  We stayed in a (hotel? hostel? not really sure what the term would be, it calls itself a 'guest house') in Shinagawa, which is a relatively quiet little area but really easily accessible to the city at large via the Yamanote line (a Japan Rail line that runs in a loop around much of downtown Tokyo).  From there, we visited the Ueno zoo, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Akihabara, Ikebukuro, and Asakusa.

We took the night bus to and from Tokyo, so we left at 11:30 PM last Tuesday and arrived at something like 7:30 AM on Wednesday.  Unfortunately, since it was a holiday (Labor Day in Japan), this was too early for anything to be open.  As in, not even cafes or ATMs.  >.>  So, we waited around for a little while, then had breakfast in the Japanese equivalent to Starbucks.  Then we went to Akihabara, which is kind of nerd central.  I actually don't like Akiba (as it seems to be commonly shortened to) much.  I think it has to do with the fact that pretty much no woman seems to go there willingly--I don't think I ever saw more than one girl who wasn't either clearly going to/from work (Akiba has lots of themed cafes, with very recognizable uniforms), or being literally dragged around by a guy (presumably a boyfriend?), and considering I was in Tokyo with a bunch of self-identified nerds, I had a fair bit of time to observe.  With such a big gender disparity, it probably makes sense that a lot of the merchandise was rather...obviously male-targeted.  (As in, LOOK, BOOBIES.  LOOK, MORE BOOBIES.)  There ended up not being much of interest for me there, and a lot that I'd rather avoid, so I doubt I'll be going back anytime soon.

Akiba does have a gundam cafe, though, which is pretty cool to go see at least once.  We ate dinner there one day.  They served fondue and the inside looks like a futuristic space port.  The food is surprisingly reasonable for a themed cafe; we figured out why when we realized a simple non-alcoholic drink could cost as much as 800 yen.  >.>  Needless to say, we stuck to water. 

Back to talking about things chronologically.  On the afternoon of the first day, we went to Ueno Zoo.  We saw pandas!  Real, live, moving pandas!  They are cute balls of fluff.  They were sleepy, and the one just kind of got up from his flop, lumbered over to a new platform, and just flopped again, no arranging or anything, just a flop (very much like a very sleepy Sherman).  We also saw some REALLY giant birds--some kind of vulture, and I think their wingspan was as long as I am tall, at the minimum.  Apparently they're capable of carrying off humans (at least, small humans, up to somewhere around the size of the average 10 year old).  They were very very cool, though I was kind of glad I wasn't seeing them in the wild.  Also there were toucans, and a baby seal, and lots of cute night animals of which I don't remember names because they were in Japanese and I couldn't actually read most of the kanji, but one looked like a housecat and I wanted to take it home with me. 

Then we went to the hotel and ate conbini (convenience store--they sell decent cheap meals here) food for dinner and flopped and died because most of us didn't actually sleep so well on bus.

The next day we went to Harajuku!  Harajuku is a famous fashion district (though since it was a weekday and not a holiday, there weren't all that many people there).  We shopped, and looked at things we weren't actually going to buy but wanted to see (like Lolita dresses), and ate lunch at a place called Sweets Paradise where you pay about 1500 yen and get to eat all you want for a little over an hour.  They have drinks and ice cream and something like 30 different kinds of cakes and other desserts and also real food like curry and salad (guess what I didn't eat, out of this list).  It was wonderful, though Japanese sweets really are sweet in that pure-sugar kind of way that does limit how much you can eat in one sitting.  I tried really hard, but I couldn't manage trying ALL the cakes and things, not within the time limit.  But there is one here in Kyoto, too, apparently--I know what I'm planning for my birthday!!! 

Also in Harajuku I got a stuffed panda (it is the most huggable thing) and a capelet (warm things which are in fashion here right now and are amazingly not fitted so I can actually wear them!) which is red wool felt and has a fur-lined hood (no idea if it's real fur or not but for the price I would guess not) and is warm and essentially a fashionable blanket, which makes me very happy.  My friend says it makes me look like I should be wandering around Paris in the 1800s.  This amuses me. 

Then we went to...ah....Shinjuku, after Harajuku, where we wandered around for a while.  Guys: Shinjuku is huge.  As in, the streets are full of traffic, there are constantly-moving people EVERYWHERE, and the buildings are so tall they look like they're about to fall on you.  There was one where I turned the corner and saw this thing and my initial thought was 'This is a blimp and it is about to crash on my head oh shoot' and then I realized it was actually a humongous building with a kind of oval-ish shape to it.  Anyways, we wandered around for a while and then found a collection of narrow, walkable, dingy-looking streets with lots of little food places tucked in there, full of drunk salarymen and other sketchy-looking people, which I'm pretty sure was less sketchy than it looked.  We had delicious, cheap, homemade ramen.  It was the best.  Then we did some karaoke, and called it a night.

The next day, we went to Ikebukuro.  We had brunch (lunch?) at a little chinese restaurant (Japanese Chinese food is nothing like American Chinese food, btw), where we had things like ramen, gyoza, and mabodoufu.  It was delicious, actually, and since it was broad daylight maybe we can ignore the fact that it was in what appeared (from the names of the not-open-yet clubs around) to be a very sketchy area.  Then we wandered in a different direction and found a much less sketchy area full of big buildings, shopping-ish-looking stuff, and colorful signs.  Near there was a little quiet nerd area, which I found much more to my liking.  We wandered back to Akiba in the evening (this is when we ate at the Gundam cafe) and it was a nice relaxing day of wandering and exploring and eating tasty things. 

We slept in on Saturday morning, then spent the morning/day at Asakusa.  Asakusa is basically the remnants of historical downtown Tokyo, from what I can tell--it has a gate with a gigantic paper lantern in it, and a willow tree (the old symbol for the 'floating world', which makes me suspect that this was an entertainment district a couple centuries back), and then a street full of shopping for everything from kimono to deep fried manju, and then more streets of shops (once again, everything from used kimono to snack foods to jeans embroidered with dragons), and a park area with a temple and a bunch of little shrines and some very pretty gardens.  We ate chocolate covered bananas and took lots of pictures and saw a bunch of brides wandering around.  It was pretty cool. 

Then, at late afternoon, we split ways.  I'm not sure about the others, but I headed to Shibuya to meet up with some of my coworkers from Mori no Ike, and also some other people who had worked at MnI the first half of the summer and were also in Tokyo at the moment.  I got there a little early and had some time to explore--Shibuya has a lot of shopping, with everything from cheap bookstores to Forever 21.  (On that note, I strongly prefer the Japanese Forever 21 to the American version.  It's much classier.  You know, except for the whole 'we don't do sizes larger than American small' thing, because it's Japan.  I did get a cheap belt because I needed one.)  Then I met up with my coworkers at 6, at this dog statue outside the station.  This was a terrible idea on Makoto's part--that statue is apparently the meetup point for every single person going to Shibuya with friends, which meant that it was surrounded by a giant mob of people!  Luckily I am tall, and I saw someone wearing a MnI sweatshirt, and was like HEY are you here to meet and he was like YES let's be tall gaijin together and let other people find us and we did and it worked.  It was one of the rare cases where being a head taller than most people was actually extremely helpful.  Once we found people, we went and got yakiniku (we call it Korean Barbecue in the US, not sure why), which means we got lots of meat and grilled the little thin slices ourselves and then ate them fresh and hot off the grill.  It's not cheap (it came out to something like 3000 yen a person), but for a special occasion it's not impossibly expensive either, and it was very tasty.  I was a little surprised when I learned that one of the things I'd been eating was beef tongue, but it was tasty so I figured I'd keep eating it anyways (this is why I tend to ask what things are made of AFTER trying them, unless they look so awful that I need reassurance as to their really being edible).  And then we did karaoke and screamed camp songs until our voices gave out. 

Finally, we got to Sunday, the last day of our visit.  We checked out of the hotel in the morning, since we'd be taking the bus back that night, and explored Shinagawa (the area around the hotel) for a while.  Then we went and did karaoke again.  We tried to get Koyami (who is very shy) to sing, and mostly succeeded by requesting the Japanese themes for Dragonball, which are ridiculous and which not a single one of us knew how to sing, so it just turned into a bunch of crazy yelling out lines because they were so ridiculous.  Finally, we spent another couple hours exploring Shinjuku.  We wandered around for a long time until we finally ended up in some area (this was another train station down the line at this point) full of kpop idol stores and korean restaurants.  It was starting to get dark, and we noticed that girls' clothes were getting smaller and smaller and the makeup more and more intense, past the point of fashion and far into the realm of 'You're a prostitute, aren't you?'.  So we turned around and headed back to the Shinjuku area.  (Note to self: Do not wander around Shinjuku alone, there are too many potentially sketchy areas and you have zero sense of direction.)  We had dinner at some point, and then went and collected our bags (we'd checked them at the hotel to avoid dragging them everywhere) and went and caught our bus. 

In overview, basically, Tokyo is an incredibly huge place with all the everything there.  Some areas are pretty awesome--I liked Harajuku and Asakusa a lot.  Others are less so--Akiba is not my favorite.  (I probably should like Shinjuku less considering the number of relatively sketchy areas we stumbled upon, but my favorite manga is set in a sketchy part of Shinjuku, so....)  The trip was hectic and incredibly busy and a lot of fun, and it was good to be exposed to a part of Japan so different from Kyoto and the Kansai region.  I probably won't go again this year, because there are lots of other places to go in Japan and I honestly think I like Kyoto better anyways (Tokyo is so big, it's really kind of too much for me to want to spend a lot of time there, and I like the atmosphere of Kyoto).  But I'm really glad I went. 

Catching up on October--part 1

At the very beginning of October, the AKP program had an overnight field trip!  We got a bus (basically, half filled with students, and half filled with staff and their families), and went to all sorts of places.  Starting very early on Friday (as in, leaving Kyoto Station at 8, which means that most of us had to leave our homestay houses closer to 7), we set out in the general direction of Northwest, towards the northern coast of Hyogo Prefecture. 

First, we went to a small town in the middle of nowhere that was really famous for soba, and made our own soba from scratch, and then ate it and wandered around for a while and saw the town's famous clock tower and ate matcha ice cream and Tat fed matcha ice cream to the fish (I'm not so sure that this was good for the fish, but they liked it well enough!).

  Making soba is hard work.  It involves getting flour (mixed buckwheat and regular, but we were given the flour pre-mixed) a little with water, then stirring it with your hands and getting all sticky, then kneading it until your hands hurt, then rolling it out flat, then rolling it out flatter, then rolling it out even flatter, until it's only like half a millimeter thick, and then folding this giant slab of really thin dough (I swear, the ingredients must have somehow multiplied to cover so much space) over itself a couple times, and taking a giant butcher knife to it to cut off really thin noodle-thickness slices.  We did this in groups of 4 or 5 and we were all a little sore by the time we were done.  Then the noodles got cooked (not by us), and we ate them.  To eat soba, you dip it in sauce--this region has a special, unusual sauce recipe, which involves mixing the normal tsuyu (dipping sauce) with raw egg, green onions, and ground up potato.  It was reasonably tasty, though the potato made it rather goopy.  After eating the soba, you were supposed to pour the hot soba cooking water into the sauce and drink it, but most of us were either too squeamish about drinking near-raw egg (the broth wasn't hot enough to cook it), or too full to even consider putting more in our stomachs (so much soba!). 

Then, we continued.  Next we went to a rice cracker factory.  They fed us little rice cakes and tea, then let us go on a nice little self-guided tour from an observation platform that let you see all the different rooms of rice cakes being made.  Unfortunately, most of the stuff wasn't actually running, so it was mostly just rooms with lots of unmoving machinery.  But in the last room on the end, the machines were grinding rice into a pulp and pounding the pulp into mochi, then giving the giant balls of mochi to two workers to cut into smaller chunks for further rice-cake-making. 

Finally, we went back on the bus and continued to Kinosaki.  Kinosaki is famous for its onsen.  Onsen are natural hot springs, which have been used in Japan for centuries.  Often, a given onsen advertises some kind of special property of their water where you're supposed to get something good if you bathe in it; these range from "This will help your arthritis!" to "You'll be able to see better!" to "You'll fall in love!" to "You'll get rich!".  We stayed the night at an onsen resort--basically, a hotel within walking distance of 7 different onsen, with another one in the building itself, and a free pass to visit all of them for the duration of your stay.  This is a wonderful concept.  I spent the late afternoon and evening walking around in a yukata (and flats--unfortunately they do NOT carry geta in my shoe size, not that it's really a surprise) going to sit around naked with a bunch of other women in very hot water.  We visited 5 in total that night, before they closed at 11--a feat that won us a prize at the hotel (I got chopsticks!). 

We also ate a really, really fancy dinner at the hotel.  As in, several courses, crab and sashimi and shabu shabu and soup and onsen tamago and all sorts of fancy foods, three different little samples of desserts, wayyy more food than any of us should have eaten, all presented on your own personal table-tray with each dish on its own little fancy plate and people coming and going serving food, taking dishes, etc.  I cannot actually describe this meal because there were too many things in it.  I was still mostly full in the morning, and then they repeated the whole thing (less fancy but still soo many foods) in the morning for breakfast, when they had like three kinds of fish and also rice and pickles and miso soup and yakitamago and so many things.  @.@  I couldn't actually eat more than a couple bites of breakfast; it was too overwhelming for my already-so-full stomach. 

In the morning, again pretty early, we got on the bus again.  This time we drove to Ama-no-hashidate--one of the famous 'This is a place with beautiful scenery!' places in Japan.  The name means something along the lines of 'heavenly bridge'.  We got out there and found out that the whole 'bridge' thing was actually literal--it's a giant bay with a land bridge cutting straight across from one side to the other.  There's a cable car going up the mountain by it so people can get a better view; we rode up and went to the observation platform, where we were instructed to stand facing away from the bay, then bend over and look at it upside down from through our legs.  (There was even a poster with Doraemon demonstrating!)  The idea is that, when you do this, it actually looks like the land bridge is going up to somewhere in the clouds.  The reality is, you get to laugh at your friends peering through their legs trying to figure out exactly what they're supposed to be looking for.  Once we figured that out, most of us did see it (many of us also figured out the easier alternative of turn your camera upside down and take a picture so you can look at it without worrying about your butt being in anyone's face). 

Then we split up and wandered around for a while.  I climbed a mountain to a temple--a one kilometer or so walk up, and then back--only to realize there was actually a bus that took people back and forth from the cable car anyways.  XD  Then we took a chairlift back down, and went out on the bridge to see the beach.  The bridge is lined with a rocky beach on one shore; the other side just has an edge, then water.  In between is a long, thin park-like area with lots of beautiful pine trees.  The contrast between the pine trees, the beach, and the water is considered very beautiful.  It was actually a really peaceful place, until we started trying to skip rocks; we were really successful for a while, until this very small child came along and decided to copy us, but didn't quite figure out the process and accidentally threw a rock at one of the other AKP student's head instead.  Then, we went and got lunch, and got back on the bus. 

Our final stop was in Kobe, which is where we got dinner.  We went to Nankin-machi, the Chinatown of Kobe, and ate delicious food from street vendors and went shopping and took pictures.  Then, we got back on the bus to head home.  On the bus, we played bingo, and I won something called やわらか焼き (yawarakayaki, which translates as something like soft-baked-thing), which turned out to be something like a pancake version of カステラ (casutera, a honey cake thing).   We got back to Kyoto Station around, what, 8PM? and returned to our respective host families, exhausted from being really busy and not really sleeping for two days. 

And that was our fall trip.  It was very exciting. 

Oh wow

So somehow, nearly a whole month went by since my last post.  I'm really not sure how that happened (in fact, a good chunk of my mental space is currently filled with 'Where the heck did October go???').  But!  That means I have lots of things to write about!

Also this blog platform takes forever to upload pictures so I will be sticking the things on facebook from now on.  (I've been putting them up there anyways, and it seems silly to stick them on both.)  You should be able to see the pictures even if you don't have a facebook account--my security is set up so non-friends can't access info about me or statuses I write, but pictures are open.  (Mostly because I know not everyone has facebook and I'm far too lazy to double post photos, plus it's not like there's anything to hide in there.)  Let me know if anyone has trouble accessing them at this link or by searching for Kristin Schreiner on Facebook.  (I'm the one with the profile picture of a girl sitting in a frying pan, in case there's any confusion over multiple Kristin Schreiners.)

ANYWAYS.  October has been a very busy month.  I'm going to give a very loose outline now and write more detailed posts about things later so I can actually give interesting things the attention they deserve, and still not write an entire novel in one post.

Classes have been very busy.  We've continued going to see various performances for my Kansai Performance class--we've seen a couple matsuri (festivals), a modern dance performance, a modern play (for lack of a better term), a noh play, and takarazuka, to date.  I'm sort of working on seeing Kabuki at some point as well, slowly.  I spent a lot of my non-scheduled time this month on our main project for the Joint Seminar class, working in a group with one other AKP student and 2 Doshisha students; we watched Aladdin in both languages and looked at the translation and all the things about that.  Disney movies translate everything into Japanese--including songs and, where possible, jokes--and a lot of the characters in Aladdin also have very strong characteristic ways of speaking (the Genie and Jafar should be recognizable even without seeing any picture, I would think), so there were a lot of things to poke at in there.  And in Japanese class, we have lots of work, from readings to kanji quizzes (a several times weekly occurrence) to essays to exams to speeches to basically everything.  I am actually learning to read, I think.  It's really rather wonderful, except for the part where I spend like 2 hours every other day memorizing like 50 new words and their kanji and pronunciation and how to write them, but hey, it's good for me.  Basically, lots of hard work, but interesting hard work so it's mostly okay with me.

Finally, we've been doing fun things wherever there is free time to squeeze in.  We had a class field trip at the beginning of October, to various places including an overnight at an onsen resort!!!  (Onsennnnnnn.)  Last weekend, I went to 映画村 with a couple friends--it's basically a village worth of sets for historical movies and TV shows, with other fun things thrown in.  We had Halloween, in which most of the AKP students brought costumes to school and spent the day dressed up (I was an alien!  Because I am an alien and I sometimes have a bad sense of humor).  I went to Kiyomizudera, a famous temple in Eastern Kyoto, one day.  As I mentioned above, I went to see a couple festivals--the fire festival at Kurama (火祭) and the 時代祭, or.....era festival?  It's basically a parade of hundreds and hundreds of people dressed up in traditional garb from all the different eras of Japanese history. 

I'm sure I've left something out.  I'll find out what when I upload my pictures and go OHHH THAT THING.  And I'll give more detail over the coming....days...weeks....umm....something like that. 

The rest of last weekend, etc.

Wow, it's Thursday night already???  This week's gone fast.  (The two kanji quizzes and then the test in Japanese class over the last 4 days may have had something to do with time magically disappearing.)  Anyways!

So I talked about last Sunday already (when we went to go see Takarazuka).  I did NOT talk about last Saturday yet.  I went to hang out with people and be social!  A whole bunch of people--I think there were close to 20 of us in the end, with 3 or 4 of those people being Japanese and the rest being AKP or other exchange students--went to Arashiyama again.  I'd been with my host family already, but we went to different places mostly and it was really fun to hang out.  Basically, we went for a walk through the temple-heavy area and bamboo forest, then sat by the river to eat lunch.  And then we went to Monkey Park.  Yes, that's really the name of the place.  Yes, there's a reason for the name--the monkeys, they are everywhere!  It's at the top of a mountain and takes 500 yen admittance fee (about $6 at current exchange rate, maybe?) and it involves seeing monkeys up close (including baby monkeys playing together and rock-banging musician monkeys) and also some really amazing views of Kyoto from above.  It was worth the money for sure, especially when a monkey stole Angel's water bottle and proceeded to sit on it and bite it until it proved inedible.  Then it threw the thing down the mountain.  We had to go back down the stairs to get it.  XD  That was my favorite monkey, I think. 

Then, most of the big group of people went off somewhere to have other lives, and 7 of us went to eat an expensive but delicious and FUN dinner at the Ninja Restaurant.  Also appropriately named.  The whole thing starts when you show up at the front gate; a whatever-you-call-the-front-standing-person in a ninja costume checks your reservation, then summons another ninja to lead you through the caves to your table.  And I do mean caves; the whole thing is set up to look underground-ish, like you're actually in a series of rock caves.  Your table is in your own private little room (it's not uncommon in Japanese restaurants to use screens and barriers to create private spaces, but this was actually it's own little cave!).  We got a course meal, which started with shuriken crackers and foie gras spread stuff, and continued through everything from pork (delicious) to chirashi zushi (raw fish with rice and mixed stuff, also delicious) to essentially deep-fried cheese with tomato and basil (also delicious) to black sesame ice cream for dessert (you should be seeing a theme in these little asides).  Then, while we were eating dessert, another ninja shows up to do some 'ninjutsu' (aka magic tricks) for us!  He was very good at the sleight of hand thing.  Mom, remember that time at the spy restaurant that you signed a card and the guy did tricks with it?  He did that, and I now have a signed card too as a souvenir.  He even had a little plastic envelope for it!  Then, to leave, you have to escape out through the caves again.  It was a lot of fun, they did the theme really well without it going cheesy, and the food was absolutely delicious and extremely plentiful.  

This weekend will be exciting as well.  We have what is essentially a school trip: the AKP program is going on a tour of Hyogo prefecture, including making our own soba somewhere for lunch tomorrow, staying at Kinosaki tomorrow night (ONSEN), and going to Amanohashi and then Kobe on Saturday before getting home late Saturday night.  It should be a lot of fun, and I will bring camera.  (This is honestly about all I know about this trip XD Will give more details when I get back!) 

Finally: Pictures!

Wow busy weekend!!

So busy that I'm actually going to split it into two posts--one now, and one later in the week when I have the pictures from it uploaded.  Right now I am going to talk about Takarazuka.

Takarazuka, as a brief introduction, is often compared to Broadway.  It's musical theater, lots of dancing and singing and all that, and they do all sorts of stories and styles within it.  The big thing is, every single person on stage is female.  They start training by getting into a very selective elite training academy for high school (which really means they've been training since forever, because otherwise how would you be good enough to get into a really incredibly selective academy??  From what I hear, this place makes the Ivy league look doable).  While training, they basically take one of two paths--musumeyaku, girl roles, or otokoyaku, boy roles.  They learn one or the other pretty much exclusively, and you can see the difference between the styles on stage.  At some point they join one of the five different troupes and put on plays with their troupe.  They're very good.

Now the theater.  This is one of two theaters in which Takarazuka is performed.  (The other is in Tokyo.)  It's a normal stage, but with a bridge around the outer edge of the orchestra pit that acts as an extension of the stage, and also two bridges that go out into the audience along the sides, which seem to serve as both part of the stage and entry/exit points.  There are crazy sets and a revolving floor and raising and lowering platforms and all sorts of lights everywhere and disco balls and crazy special effects considering it's a live performance. 

The specific play we saw was essentially "The Man in the Iron Mask".  Set in France during the reign of Louis XIV, it involves the Three Musketeers running around, wreaking havoc, and switching the king with his much nicer identical twin Philip.  Also some romance in there, some fight scenes, and some rather crazy interludes.

For example, the play started with a narrator introducing the era and explaining the background.  Only he got it wrong the first couple times.  He introduced Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution....then Joan of Arc....then a couple more historical figures....all of whom told him he wasn't in the right time....and then finally got to the right thing.  XD  Then it proceeded to be serious for a while, mostly showing how King Louis was a womanizing jerk--except this involved elaborate dances with dresses that could stand on their own so the women could dance out of them, not to mention a dramatic sword fight involving at least 20-25 people in a cafe to introduce the Three Musketeers.  Another interlude scene was set in a jail.  I'm pretty sure it was supposed to show what a cruel government Louis had running, but honestly, by the time it suddenly started playing the 'Ghostbusters' theme song halfway through', it was already clear it was a comedic scene.  Another scene involved a woman hanging from the ceiling, literally wearing a giant disco ball as a skirt as she sang. 

The show itself was really cool.  They did everything from on-stage costume shifts to shadow puppets to court dances to dramatic death scenes to marriage proposals to completely changing outfits in the 5 seconds they were off stage.  And this was only the first hour and a half!

The play basically finished in the first half of the show.  Then there was intermission.  After that, a really amazing, almost variety show-like work was performed.  It was literally a dozen dance scenes, each with its own costumes and plot, all very loosely based around the theme of 'American'.  (It was called Royal Straight Flush and I think poker is associated with America here.)  One was a Miss World contest, another basically acting out the Vietnam War (hippies and all), another essentially West Side Story set in the Old West, another about Las Vegas, another literally people taking on the roles of the 10-Jack-Queen-King-Ace of Spades, another full of people dressed as indians dancing around.  Despite some stereotyping and really interesting attempts at singing in English, it was incredibly fun to watch.  The shifting scenes, incredible costumes (HOW MANY SEQUINS CAN YOU PUT ON ONE COAT), fifty people dancing in perfectly choreographed unison, singing, stylized battles, stylized romances, and just general over-the-top-ness is more than I can put into words.

And then the Grand Finale came.  If I'd thought the rest was crazy, this was even more so.  There were probably close to 100 people on stage--the whole troupe--all wearing crazy sequined costumes and dancing around.  The people who had played main roles were wearing essentially peacock tails (in shape, not color--the colors were black and white) made out of dyed ostrich feathers, with sparkly strands mixed in, that stuck up higher than their heads and as wide as their armspans.  There were bows, and dancing, and more bows, and swirling spotlights, and colorful lights all over, and more dancing, and finally the main peoples' bows.  They had some of the troupe dancing in the aisles by the audience for a while.  It was over-the-top insanely amazing.  Like, really mind-blowing. 

This was my Sunday afternoon, guys.

Life is busy!

I haven't posted in a while.  >.>  Oops.  But now I can talk about lots of things!

Let's see....last weekend I left off with the weekend still ahead.  On that Saturday, I went and found a bookstore with a friend.  We bought manga (105円!!!) and chatted and went to various stores and stared at the plastic models of food outside restaurants.  I don't know how they make plastic look that tasty.  (It being late afternoon and a while since lunch probably gave them a boost.)  It was fun. 

Then, on Sunday, I went to Arashiyama (嵐山) with my host family.  It's a little town with mountains on all sides, a big river flowing through, and lots of temples and shrines.  Also lots of tourists, apparently especially during spring and fall, when the trees change color and then again when cherry blossoms bloom.  It was very scenic and pretty and I has pictures. 

山

My host parents.

Still with the sideways pic thing.

Temple.  Big temple.  Tenryuji temple.

Niwa!

Koi!  The orange ones are so pretty.

Sideways bamboo.  Bamboo is TALL. 

I am told this shrine is known for hair care.  Like, some shrines you go to pray to meet a good husband, or for good health--apparently at this one apparently you pray for good hair.

DUCKS

Nonomiya shrine.  Apparently mentioned in the Tale of Genji.  This one is apparently good for meeting a good husband.

Then this week has been school and homework and class and kanji quiz and wandering around talking and buying manga.  Also we are planning to see a takarazuka play this weekend!  Takarazuka is probably best compared to broadway--lots of singing, dancing, bright lights, and crazy costumes.  Except the whole cast is female.  They train from something like middle school, some to play female roles and others to play male roles, and can become very famous and popular.  (This is about all I know about Takarazuka, so further inquiries should be directed to the internet.)  The play theoretically follows the plot of the Three Musketeers.  It should be fun.

Also planning to eat at Ninja Restaurant on Saturday.  It's expensive :( but should be fun!  Looking at the english translation of their website, they have themed food and a ninja labyrinth.  Also it looks like the food is practically gourmet.  Will have to see if it's as good as it sounds. 

Pictures!!

I spent the day today walking around Gosho, the imperial palace in Kyoto--or more specifically, the grounds of the imperial palace.  The actual imperial residence (which hasn't been occupied since, according to Wikipedia, 1868) is available for tours, but as a foreigner you need to give your passport and advance notice to enter, and I did not do either of those, so I did not enter.  I will sometime, though--this is literally across the street from school, so it's really easy to get there. 

The gardens outside the imperial residence are very very pretty.  It's amazing that despite being sandwiched between lots of city streets, the sound of traffic kind of fades away inside--I heard cicadas and crows, not engines.  Also lots of people with dogs, small children, and/or elderly relatives were walking around.  It was very relaxed and happy-feeling. 

I can't figure out how to make it rotate.

Jinja!

The dark blobs in the water are fish.

Chashitsu!  (Tea room, really a house but w/e)

Still can't rotate.  Cat!

Crane!

Front of chashitsu!

View from chashitsu!

Bridge by chashitsu!

Garden outside chashitsu!

Inside chashitsu!

As you can probably tell from the pics, the chashitsu and the little pond and shrine by it were my favorite part of the gardens.  I could happily spend a couple hours sitting in that area.  (As per the way the world works, it's in the corner farthest from school, of course.  XD)