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)

Typhoon!

The last couple days have been pretty quiet.  Monday came with a prediction of thunderstorms, so I didn't end up going to Gion (decided to save it for weather I actually wanted to walk around in).  I did homework and hung out instead. 

Then, today (Wednesday), a typhoon rolls through.  This means classes were canceled on grounds of high winds, heavy rain, and just general not-safe-for-long-commutes-ness.  It wasn't actually that bad in my area, though.  I mean, yeah, it poured, and we did have gusting winds...but most of the day you could've gone out with a sturdy umbrella and a raincoat and been fine.  I suspect part of the cancellation was fear that it would get a lot worse in the afternoon (that was the prediction, and the wind gusts did become more frequent in that time), and that it would keep people from getting home again.  The sad thing is, since it was deemed too dangerous to go out to school, most of us figured it would be too dangerous to go do other things too.  So today has been pretty quiet, yet again. 

Anyways, this makes this week pretty low-key overall.  Monday was a holiday (成人の日, which the internet rather awkwardly translates as "Respect for the Aged Day"), and Wednesday is Typhoon Day, and Friday will be another holiday (秋分の日, the autumnal equinox), so classes really only happened yesterday and tomorrow. 

Speaking of classes, though, we're finally sorted into our actual classes for the semester.  I'm in Ohno-sensei's class, and I think it's going to be good for me.  Her description yesterday involved a lot of newspaper article reading, literature reading, speaking refinement, writing refinement, and lots of kanji.  Basically the things I need to work on (reading -> kanji, speaking/writing -> being polite and more formal, kanji -> kanji).  So hopefully I will learn lots of things from class. 

With the weather being the way it's been, I'm afraid I don't have much of interest to report.  But it's supposed to be sunny again from tomorrow on!  So we can go have fun again.  So many places to explore...

Long weekend!

Two of the three days of long weekend have gone by.  Then we will have three days of class.  Then we will have another long weekend.  (The program director tells us this was on purpose, to give us a chance to make friends and explore a little before the real work sets in.  I personally appreciate it!) As I said before, Friday was spent at a Noh play. The pictures below are a little blurry because it was dim and I didn't want to use flash in a theater, but you get the idea.

Audience members sit on tatami mats.

The bridge (left) leads from offstage to onstage, and is considered part of the stage itself.

There's always a pine tree painted for scenery, theoretically because noh was originally performed in shrines (the style is based on shrine dances), which often have large pine trees around.

The stage sticks out and the audience sits on 2 sides of it. 

On Saturday, I spent the day wandering around Shijo again with lots of people.  We ended up with a group of like 11 people.  o.o  Too many for a crowded shopping area.  We ended up doing a lot of waiting while a couple people looked through a store they thought was interesting.  It was fun to hang out and talk, though, and I got to know a couple people better, which was nice.  Also I got the layout of the place a little better.  We've been going to Teramachi, which is a hangout for young people, full of coffee shops and lots of different styles of clothes and accessories stores and restaurants and game arcades and all sorts of *stuff*.

Today (Sunday) I spent the morning sleeping in, then went to Doshisha to meet up with a group of people.  A couple of us were AKP people, but others were exchange students from other programs and Doshisha students, so I met a lot of new people too.  We hung out and played Super Smash Bros (yes, I lost pretty badly, but it was fun anyways) and talked and snacked and generally had a good time.  And then I went shopping again, this time with just one other person.  Teramachi is a lot more manageable in small groups, and I feel like I got a lot better look at it this time around.  They have lots of cool stuff!  Like, Jen, we found a Lolita store full of super-kawaii (super-expensive) dresses and petticoats and shirts and bows and bags and shoes and stuff.  Course, it's all way way too small for me, so I don't have to worry about accidentally spending too much.  >.>  We also found lots of stores that sell cute hats and scarves and phone charms and stuff, which I CAN buy, so shopping isn't a completely impossible thing for me here, at least.

One thing that I also really like about Kyoto is that you never know what you'll run into.  Like on our way from the train station to Teramachi, we ran into this.

 It was this little temple, just stuck in the street, with a bunch of people chanting Buddhist sutras and incense burning and a willow tree decorated with prayer strips and a waterfall lined with these statues.  It was really pretty and peaceful, and completely out of place on a street mostly filled with businesses and restaurants.  

There's also a little old temple in the middle of the fashionable shopping street of Teramachi.  Kyoto is covered with these small temples and shrines--there are little roadside shrines near school and near my house that are little more than a roof and an incense holder, there are this kind of small temple for the neighborhood, and there are things as famous as Kiyomizudera and Kinkakuji.  Even houses, you see brand new ones standing next to buildings that're clearly several centuries old.  It's impossible to avoid seeing things like that (though I don't know why you'd really WANT to avoid it).  I personally like seeing what I can come across just while walking around doing something else. 

Lots of new life things

Today was a busy day!  Short summary: placement test in the morning, lunch with Doshisha students taking up a good chunk of afternoon, one class, then off on field trip to see noh play.  I was basically going from 8 AM until 10 PM. 

Longer summary following.

This morning (well, technically yesterday morning and also this morning, because we had speaking portion yesterday), we took placement tests to determine Japanese level.  This is after a week or so of review.  It was a fairly long test, with a range of questions from relatively easy to very difficult.  For me, the very difficult were pretty much all, "WHAT IS THIS KANJI???"  The rest focused mostly on reading comprehension (I'm good at that, I've had lots of practice in all kinds of languages), and speaking yesterday (considering my first large chunk of Japanese was learned pretty much solely through speaking, I'm OK with that), and writing.  The writing could have been better, mostly because the question we were to answer was terrible.  "Why did you want to come to Japan?"  Well, okay, I want to talk Japanese lots and travel places and meet people.  That's at most 3 sentences, and the only grammar you can possibly work in is connective て form.  So.....on a placement test where the point is showing off one's skills.....what is one to do?  Lots of BSing, trying to work in more complicated grammar, and repeating oneself in various different ways, apparently.  It was a very bad essay from a writing skill standpoint, repetitive and unorganized and lacking any real message worth the number of words it had....but it did show off grammar usage abilities and a little bit of kanji usage abilities (there were no complicated kanji to use in there, but oh well, I don't know many complicated kanji anyways). 

And that was placement test.  I am in Ohno-sensei's class apparently, which we *think* is the top-level class but I'm not 100% sure and won't be sure until Tuesday when class starts for real.  It's kind of weird--I spent the summer knowing that most of the people I was working with were better at Japanese than me, and now I'm at the top of the group I'm closest to.  I'm not sure what to think of my Japanese level.  @.@ 

Next thing.  Lunch with people!  Basically, we had a luncheon thing, theoretically to thank various people (read: Japanese students) who had been showing us around campus and the like, but more realistically to eat sushi and pizza and chat and make friends and be told about various English-language clubs that want to make friends with us.  It was fun because I want to make friends, and they want to make friends, and this is a good deal all around.  Also sushi.  I do not know yet if I will be joining any of the clubs mentioned today, mostly because I do not know what other clubs there ARE yet (and since the Japanese students are still on summer break the whole thing is irrelevant for another couple weeks), but the fact that they actively want to be friends with foreign people and are clearly willing to put up with language barriers and the like is a huge plus in their direction.  Also it was funny that they all tried to recruit people by going, "We talk English sometimes and Japanese sometimes!  We meet a couple times a week!  Also we go drinking together once a week or so!"

Class was joint seminar class and went until 4:30.  That class will be more interesting once Japanese students are no longer on summer break.  And then after class, we ran to station, got on train, got off train, got lost, got directions, got more help, and got to Noh theater around 5:10.  Noh play started 5:30.  We had time to buy onigiri for dinner but that was about it.  XD 

Noh play was very interesting, to be honest.  It's not my favorite theater type still, but I have a much higher opinion than I did a day ago when all I'd ever seen were video clips.  What we saw was actually a bunch of noh-related things; first some short dances taken from various plays, then a longer dance selection, then a kyogen slapstick-comedy thing, then more short dances, then an intermission, and then a full-length play.  All in all, it was about 3 hours.  My favorite parts were the Kyogen, in which a small child talked in old-fashioned Japanese and made fools of two grown men through the use of an invisibility hat, and the actual full-length play, a piece called Yamamba.  The play was about a dancer who made a really good dance about the mountains, and hence was given the name Yamamba (a legendary mountain spirit who sometimes appears as an old lady).  The dancer-Yamamba goes on a pilgrimage and crosses the mountains, where she meets the spirit-Yamamba.  Then she teaches the spirit-Yamamba her dance, and the spirit-Yamamba dances it, and they go their separate ways.  The tricky bit comes in when you realize that spirit-Yamamba is essentially the mountains that inspired the dancer-Yamamba's dance.  So the mountains showed the dance to the dancer, who then taught it to the mountains.  Which is the real Yamamba?  *Head spins*  It was an interesting piece, with some vigorous dancing and dramatic costumes (spirit-Yamamba actually *looked* like a mountain, through creative shaping of the basic trousers and kimono top that Noh actors wear), and it's definitely better live than in video clips and in whole length rather than just a short dance piece. 

From here on out is weekend.  It is a 3 day weekend, because Monday is....agh, I don't even remember, some special holiday like 'respect for the elderly' day.  I am planning on going to Shijo (a shopping district) on Saturday with people, and Gion (those not familiar, google it) on Monday, and not sure yet on Sunday, and also doing Tuesday's homework somewhere in there.  Yay exploring!  So I should have pictures to post sometime soon. 

Yes, Jen, food is still delicious.  Katsudon, some korean dish with beef my host mom made the other night, sushi, Japanese pizza that actually tasted GOOD and like real PIZZA, apple and sweet-cheese bread-pastry-thing. 

More new classes

Also food because Jen keeps telling me I need to talk about food.  Hi Jen! 

Today Japanese was more review, but with a different teacher; this one was actually review, mostly of stuff I learned freshman year (or more accurately, learned while abroad in high school, and then learned properly freshman year when someone explained how it worked and why half the time what I was doing was wrong).  It's been a while, so the review was good for me.  Then we spent about half the class talking about plastic surgery and the merits and problems that arise from allowing children to get it, theoretically to practice -ば form verbs ('if' conjugation), but really mostly just all of us going, "Um, no, 12 year olds should not be getting nose jobs."  It was a fun class, for the most part. 

Then, after lunch, we had a workshop--we get to have various workshops throughout the semester, called 'practicals', that will let us learn about different parts of Japanese culture and lifestyle.  This one wasn't really culture oriented so much as safety--it was all about self defense.  It was actually pretty funny, watching a bunch of adult men trying to explain different things to guard against to an audience where only half or less understood what they were saying most of the time.  Then they taught us various hold breaks (aka what to do if someone grabs you) and taught us the local equivalent of 911 and basically ran around in circles making funny faces while acting out various scenarios, then encouraging us to copy the scenarios amongst ourselves (ostensibly to practice the various hold breaks).  It was fun.

Finally, I had my last class, which is a seminar made up of half AKP students and half Doshisha students.  Except the Doshisha students are still on summer vacation.  A little problematic.  Anyways, the topic of the class seems to be comparing Japanese and American culture through examining the little stories and toys and etc. that everyone knows but people don't really talk about--like, we all know Beauty and the Beast and The Little Engine That Could, and lots of us played with Barbie or Legos, but they don't come up in everyday conversation.  So we're starting to look into that stuff, and we can do some of it by looking at readings and talking about commonalities in American culture, but we need to wait for the Japanese students to start classes to really get into the meaty bits.  It should be a really interesting class, I think. 

Food.  Jen, hi, you've been looking for this--I don't have pictures of food but all the stuff I'm eating is really yummy and way better than dining hall food, so you can be jealous.  <3 

Food at home is pretty much made by my host mother.  Breakfast is bread (Japanese bread consists of huge, puffy slices, like twice the size of a normal slice of bread but so airy that it's got about the same substance) and fruit and yogurt and sometimes an egg with ham but not always.  My host mom always asks if I've really eaten enough and I always end up insisting that yes, I really couldn't eat any more if I tried so she should finish that last slice of apple. (Japanese fruit, guys....it's expensive compared to American, but it's so perfect and ripe and delicious that it's WORTH IT.  I swear, their humongous apples are the sweetest, crispest, juiciest apples ever.) 

Lunch I eat at/around school, which up 'till now has meant at the dining hall.  It's different than a normal dining hall because the food is DELICIOUS.  Like, not just good for dining hall food, but good in general compared to real people food.  Also most things are around 200 yen, about $2.50 (THE EXCHANGE RATE MAKES ME SOOOOO SAD), which is pretty cheap compared to what it works out to with AVI Fresh at Wellesley.  Today I had udon with a sort of disk of tempura'd onions and carrot chunks and all sorts of veggies all in one mixed-up chunk.  Yesterday I had some kind of I don't even know what kind of chicken but it was tasty.  Last week I had kara-age (fried chicken, Japanese style) and it was tender and delicious.  I'm sure at some point we'll branch out and find other places to eat (e.g. once we get bored of the dining hall's admittedly limited options), but for right now tasty food is readily available.

Dinner is at home again.  Today my host mom made grilled fish, which literally means a big chunk of fish stuck under the broiler.  She called the type of fish 'sabo', which according to my new electronic dictionary (which the AKP people found a company to donate, it turns out!!!!  Yay happy wallet!!!), is not a word that in any way relates to fish.  But the internet tells me that the reason my electronic dictionary is unhelpful is that the word I'm looking for is actually 'saba', which both the internet and my dictionary say is mackerel.  Either way, it's very tasty fish.  We also had octopus mixed with cucumber slices and a mix of boiled veggies and (of course) rice.  Other dinners have been things like Chinese-style stir fry (I would question how Chinese this is and how much that's just the word my mom uses for it), delicious wonderful noodles of chilled deliciousness, etc.  I like homemade food lots. 

Umm....yes.  That covers the most important things.  Last but not least: purikura looks like this. 

 See all the shinies and colors and everything?  I can't get a closer shot with my camera, unfortunately, I can't hold it still enough and everything gets blurry.  But there are hearts and rainbows and bows everywhere and eyes look twice as big as normal and everyone turns pale which means I turn WHITE.  It's fun. 

More first classes

Also food because Jen keeps telling me I need to talk about food.  Hi Jen! 

Starting classes

Japanese class this week is a review--which doesn't actually mean it's a review, because I already learned new stuff today in class.  What it really means is that the groups we're in aren't officially our classes yet, and we don't actually take our placement tests until Thursday/Friday (speaking on Thursday, listening and written on Friday).  The groups we're currently in seem to be level based--for example, all of us who have finished third year Japanese, and a couple who have finished 2nd year but seem to be ahead of most 2nd year students, are in the same 'review group'.

But like I said....the stuff we did in class today, while supposed to be review, was stuff I'd never actually had explained to me.  And from talking to other people in the class, I know I'm not alone with that.  I'm not sure if the sensei just had really high expectations for what's covered in our classes, or if it's stuff we missed out on by skipping first year Japanese (pretty much all of us at third year level skipped first year somehow, whether by study abroad, previous classes, or self-study/tutoring), or if it's just that thing where HEY we all come from different schools and hence different curricula, or what.  But it's going to be challenging, I think--which is good.  I like a good challenge, so long as it's one I can reasonably meet.

I'm also taking a class on contemporary theater in Kansai (the region of Japan that includes Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, and also Wakayama where I studied abroad in high school), which seems like it's going to be interesting.  The only real overlap with my theater-focused class at Wellesley is some talking about Noh....which will be different here because we're actually going to see a Noh play, instead of just focusing on videos (!!!).  I'm excited for that--I'm hoping that by seeing a live performance, I'll catch onto what people seem to like about the style so much.  On video, it's very (very very very) slow and rhythmic and sleep-inducing, not to mention it's chanted in classical Japanese (the equivalent to us listening to a play in Old English), so no one can understand a word of it, really.  But enough people seem to really love it that I feel like there has to be SOMETHING behind that?  We'll see.  I get to go see that play on Friday, so I'll be able to say more about it then.

Beyond that, the theater class will be covering more contemporary and also lesser-known theater styles, so it won't overlap much with what I was doing before overall.  It also seems to have a lot of room to explore your own interests, so long as they're within the realm of performance.  I'd like to look into takarazuka (sort of like an all-female version of Broadway) for my final project, if possible, maybe looking at literary themes within that genre.  But I don't have to decide that just yet--our final project proposals aren't actually due until November, so plenty of time! 

I'll also be taking a class that's a joint seminar with Doshisha students.  (For those not so good with Japanese names, Doshisha is the name of the school I'm studying at right now.)  That starts tomorrow, and to be honest, I'm not quite sure what it's going to be about!  But I know it's got a much higher percentage of Japanese students than normal, which ups the chances of being able to make friends.  I like making friends, so that makes me happy.  I'm excited to see how that'll go. 

I don't have new pictures for today, so anyone who looked at what I posted on Facebook yesterday will have seen these already...but I figured I'd stick up some pictures of my neighborhood, so people can see the type of place it is.  It's more towards inaka (countryside) than downtown, despite being a less than 20 minute commute from school (which is towards downtown).  There are scattered rice paddies and small veggie farms around, and street traffic is pretty low volume; it's got a nice quiet atmosphere.  My street is mostly populated by older couples, though a couple families have small children.  A short walk away is the Katsura river, which is lined by more small farms--when we walked by, we saw lots of people fishing (it's still summer weather here).

This is leaving my train station.

FIELD

MY HOUSE

Also today I went shopping with friends and we found an entire store dedicated to KPop idols.  Posters, wall scrolls, coin purses, folders, playing cards, postcards, even socks (???) with pictures of members of various boy bands all over them!!!  It was really amusing.  Also we did purikura (little machines that take pictures of you and then let you decorate them with hearts and stars and writing and bows and rainbows before printing them for you) and so now I have pictures of me looking ridiculously pale (because strong flash + pale skin) with giant eyes (because Japan) and lots of hearts and stars and rainbows.  It's very fun. 

Moving in

I am at my host family's house right now.  It is in a quiet neighborhood west of my school, very peaceful.  I'm really glad I was speaking Japanese during the summer, because it makes the transition to living in a mostly-Japanese environment much easier!!  My host family is made up of three people, really.  First is my okaasan (mother), who is a housewife and likes gardening; we've been talking a lot, and she's the one explaining all the how-the-house-works things to me, like what to do with laundry and when to shower and those basic things that kind of vary from house to house.  She also explains words and kanji to me, which is really helpful.  It seems like she's made kind of a hobby out of raising exchange students--this family has been hosting with AKP for over 10 years, so she knows exactly what kinds of things I'm not likely to know about or understand right off the bat, which is really helpful! 

Next is my otousan (dad); he works from home, I'm not exactly sure doing what but whatever, and likes to watch TV.  He's been talking to me a lot too, during meals and everything.  They're both very friendly. 

Last is my oneesan (big sister).  Despite being a grownup and having a job, she continues to live at home; I get the impression that this isn't all that unusual for unmarried women, though it's more unusual for women to be unmarried at her age.  She spends most of her time in her room, listening to Arashi and doing I'm not really sure what, but she eats meals with everyone else and when we're around each other, she's friendly and sociable.  I think she's nice. 

This weekend has been mostly moving in, getting settled and unpacked, and getting into the routine of things.  Being able to speak Japanese has helped a lot; I can ask when I have questions and be pretty sure of getting the information I'm looking for, rather than just stumbling along and hoping I understood right!  Then, from tomorrow (Monday), we start classes.  Sort of.  We start our elective classes, the ones that're on cultural stuff, but the first week of class is sort of a 'review' for Japanese classes, before we take placement tests on Thursday/Friday (speaking on Thursday, listening and writing on Friday).  That's kind of nice, because it gives me some time to actually remember how to read a little before the test. 

Also I have some pictures of things.  We went on a two-hour-or-so trip to Shimabara, which used to be a district for geisha (called geiko in Kyoto) and oiran (who also have a different name here but I forgot it), the other day. It still has a lot of the old teahouses and shrines around, despite being pretty solidly a residential neighborhood now, so it was interesting to explore.