Ok! I finally got the pictures from a friend and after slimming down the 450+ pictures down to a manageable level I’ll start my first post after a 10 day hiatus by describing the ‘Deer Park’ at Nara!

After letting my host family know that I was going to be home much later that night (around 10pm vs. the normal 5-6pm), I trudged off to classes eagerly looking forward to going to Nara. Because Nara lies about an hour train ride away from Kyoto, we skipped out on 1.5 hours of classes in order to get to Nara with enough time to do everything that our director had slated for us. Upon our arrival, we were greeted by an almost constant chorus of ‘Hello!’s from eager, young Japanese school children greeting the foreigners. While riding the escalator out of the subway station, the shouts even echoed so much that it just became a buzzing of various syllables! Silly kids =P

Before I go any further I need to explain why we were going to Nara, and what exactly we were so excited to see there. Nara was the first actual capital of Japan from ~700-900AD, and along with Kyoto is considered to be the cultural seat of the country. Before the declaration from the Emperor following the defeat of the Japanese empire after WWII, deer were seen to be messengers of the Shinto Gods and were protected in Nara as divine messengers. After the declaration, because Shintoism was denounced as a state religion, the deer that inhabited Nara were instead made a national treasure making it illegal to hunt them at all. Instead of the deer in Utah or in various other parts in the US, the deer at Nara are docile and semi-domesticated. You can buy ‘deer crackers’ from vendors all over Nara to feed the literal throngs of deer there, and if you find a particularly bright young deer you can bow to them and they will bow back in exchange of a cracker! Instead of describing any more, I’ll instead put a little pictorial montage of our day in Nara =) 

The entire day we were seeing, feeding, petting, and hugging deer...until Anna (right) found out that she is very, very allergic to deer...something-or-other. After her eyes swelled shut, and her sinuses were absolutely killing her, we finally put 2 and 2 together and stopped playing with the cute deer =(

Anyways! Montage!

May 19

Kiyo Mizudera

Like I explained last week Saturdays are usually spent with ones home-stay family, but seeing as how my Okaasan works every Saturday, I instead choose to go on the optional excursions that Dr. Miller sets up for us. And boy, am I ever glad that I went to the one he set up today!

There are 2 destinations in Kyoto that almost all tourists go visit: Kinkakuji, and where I went today Kiyo Mizudera. Amongst the throngs of students visiting from other locations on school trips, other foreigners like ourselves, and native Japanese that were taking the day to look at the beautiful scenery nearby there were dozens of little shops that had the most amazing things in them. There were some beautiful pottery stands with home-crafted pottery that this part of town was known for, gorgeous hand-painted fans, and a Studio Ghibli shop (highlight of my day =P) that was hidden in an alleyway.

Once we broke away from the shops that dotted the hill leading up to Kiyo Mizudera, we made it to the actual Otera (remember, Buddhist), we took a few pictures, and were then accosted by throngs of students. These, however, were not junior high schoolers, but instead were students belonging to the ESS (English Speaking Society) of a nearby University that wanted to give us a free tour of the large temple complex and in exchange we would help them by speaking English with them along the way. Of course we accepted without hesitation!

The first thing they showed us was a building termed ‘The Womb of Buddha’s Mother’. You paid 100 yen to enter the sub-basement of a building with absolutely NO light. You grabbed onto large beads with your left hand and held onto them for your life as they guided you through a maze. In the center of the maze was a stone ball with some Sanskrit written on it with a small spotlight to illuminate it. Each visitor was supposed to spin the stone to become clean, and then continue on through the maze to the exit. Roller coaster created adrenaline had absolutely nothing on the adrenaline created from being in constant fear that you might hit your head on a low hanging beam that most Japanese regularly pass under with no problem. 10 minute adrenaline rush, haha…I’m not quite sure what to call it at that point, haha =P

After the womb, they showed us a few other structures, among which was an archway that only the emperor and his guards were allowed to pass through. The big draw of the Otera was the natural spring water at the end of the complex. The spring was piped in over the roof of a small stone building via 3 streams. Each visitor would take a long metal pole with a cup attached to the end and fill it up with one of the streams. If you drank from the one on the far right it was said that you would get luck in your career, the middle one granted you beauty, and the far left one would give you health for the next year. The Japanese college students also told us that if you drank from more than 1 stream that you would get bad luck for the entire year. Yikes!

After drinking from the beauty stream, we ended our day by meandering back through the shops on the hillside and getting some lunch. I then headed to the church with a friend and used the Wifi to catch up on 5 hours of TV that we missed over the past few weeks, haha. It was a fun day =P

May 17

Ok. So. I’m writing this on a different day. I forgot my camera at home today, and instead took pictures from a different camera…So before I write up what was honestly the best day of recent memory, I want to get those pictures to include them in with what I’m saying instead of allowing you all to just inappropriately imagine what it was like…which I know would not do today justice at all. So instead look at this picture of a funny dog in the interim =)

May 18

Mt. Kurama

Today was a spectacularly breath-taking day! After classes, we all hopped on the subway to the end of the line and boarded a 1-man-train headed toward Kuramayama (Mount Kurama). They call it a 1-man-train because the 2-car locomotive is ran entirely from platform to platform by 1 man each day; the same man will sell tickets at the ticket booth, collect them boarding the train, operate the train, and ensure that all the passengers are off before opening up the turn-stiles allowing us off the platform.

It was a very pretty 40 minute train ride down, with some great scenery of trees, small villages, and of rivers and streams dotting the large hills in the distance. (*Interjection. Trying to write this all while my more-than-slightly-rebellious teenage home-stay-brother is literally pounding on the table and listening to some Japanese heavy metal is no easy feat. Let me tell you! >.<*) Upon departing from the train Dr. Miller educated us on the history of the mountain that we were about to climb…which I no longer remember =P. I do remember, however, that it had something to do with a legend of the ‘Tengu’, half bird, half man monsters that lived on the mountain and required obeisance of some type or another from the people of the village below…and the pictures of the masks are supposedly how the Tengu were rumored to look like.

We started the hour and a half ascent of the mountain and saw some pretty awesome architecture (both natural and man-made) on the way up. The jewel, however, wasn’t on the climb itself, but instead was on the top of the mountain, in an Otera (remember that Otera are Buddhist temples). The grounds of the temple were beautiful, but were not the main draw; it was the ritual crypts beneath the temple that were the sight this time around! Literally thousands of small urns were placed carefully on hundreds of wooden and stone shelves that seemed to be carved out of the natural basement they were kept in. Within the urns were locks of hair of deceased worshipers that were ritually washed in sacred waters from a nearby natural spring, and carefully buried within the crypt to symbolically await the time for their new re-birth into life. Among the multitudes of urns were 3 statues of importance within the Buddhist religion, Kannon-sama (the Bodhisattva of mercy and grace) and 2 others that I didn’t recognize that were all open armed to thank the dutiful service of those that were entombed within.

After we were satisfied looking around and taking pictures in the beautifully lit crypt, we walked a little bit down the mountain to catch a rail car back down to the base to make our way to the next destination; an Onsen nestled among the hills near the small town we started out from. After a short 10 minute jaunt to the Onsen (remember that Onsen are natural hot-springs that are made into public baths), we divided the group by gender and entered our appropriate Onsen. After showering off and cleaning ourselves, the 5 guys sunk into the waters that were being piped in from the nearest mountain. The temperature wasn’t all too hot for American standards, but was considered to be substantially cooler than almost all other Onsen by the Japanese standard (it was around 102 degrees).

While I’m not embarrassed by the human anatomy at all, it was funny to find out that 2 of the group members we are with are extremely uncomfortable with public nudity. Dr. Miller in effect told both of them to get over it and to just learn how to deal with it if they chose not to be open to that aspect of Japanese culture. He reminded us that the first stop on our railway trip was to a town with 7 Onsen, and that we would be visiting each one of them, which made the rest of us chuckle and formulate plans to make that day centered around having fun at the other two’s expense =P.

The soak in the Onsen was extremely refreshing in a lot of different ways. For obvious reasons I’m not able to provide any photographic evidence of how beautiful the scene was from the outdoor pool, but it was breath-taking (a verb pair that I seem to be using a lot =P)!

After the Onsen, we all headed back to our various homes and called it a night =)

No embarrassing Japanese today =(…

May 16

Festival and Castle?! =O

Due to the sudden, unexpected rain of yesterday, we had pushed off seeing the Aoi Matsuri (Blue Festival) from yesterday to today. We walked across the street after classes to the Shimogamo Shrine (Shinto), where the Festival processions proceed from. We hunkered right down behind one of the screens and waited for the actual procession to get going. After patiently waiting for a few minutes, we were rewarded with some horse races. Meh. I’ve seen horses before. But the cool thing to see was the authentic (or so they speculate =P) Heian-period garb that the horse riders and other performers in the festival don (Yup, I just used ‘don’. Deal wid’ it =P).

After sitting in the dirt for a few minutes, we moved on to our next destination: Nijyou Castle. After going through it all, I determined that this is one site that both of my parents would find amazing for their own different reasons. The castle itself was built by the Tokugawa family just 4 years after the rise of the Tokugawa family to the Shogunate seat-of-power. The Tokugawas were constantly afraid of the emperors assassination, and built many such castles as this as strongholds to house him in for indeterminate periods of time to confuse their enemies. One of the tricks they used to thwart would-be assassins was to create what they called ‘nightingale floor boards’. By using some type of carpentry I never heard of nor understood, all of the original wooden floors in the castle proper would creak very loudly when stepped on. It was literally impossible to make 2 steps without making a jarring sound. The sounds, however, are also slightly musical in a sense. The carpenters made them all make different pitches, giving the pitter-patter of steps a lilting, melodic sense to them—thus the nightingale floorboards =).

 

The gardens outside of the castle proper were breath-taking. My mother could have (and probably would have) spent the entire day just wandering around the half-dozen or so gardens that dotted the complex. They had azalea gardens, sand gardens, shrubbery gardens, tree gardens, among many others. After going to the festival, it only gave us about 2 hours to take it all in…which made me wish that this flirting with Kyoto was more than just a measly 2 weeks so that we would have enough time to visit and do everything with enough time to enjoy it sufficiently =(…

After the castle, a few friends and I walked a few blocks down to ‘Shijou’ (the shopping district in Kyoto for lack of a better explination) to do some window shopping. After spending a few hours there, we each made our way to the public transit stop that we needed to get home.

Today was definitely a lot of fun, and a very cool cultural experience to take in. And luckily I made a pretty embarrassing mistake today, one of the ones that everyone makes when learning a new language, and one that I know I will make again…

What I wanted to say: Yesterday we didn’t really do anything much.

What I actually said: The day after tomorrow we didn’t really do anything much.

Silly me =P

May 15

Painting and Relaxation

After the sweets buffet the day prior and the large amounts of walking that we had been going through for the past few days, today was the perfect day to take a small break and rest. After classes we were originally scheduled to watch the Aoi Matsuri (Blue Festival) which passes quite literally right across the street from our church building, but due to a sudden onset of heavy rain, the city postponed the festival from Tuesday to Wednesday, so we re-arranged our schedule and ended up having a free day to do personal excursions, homework, or really anything else that we wanted.

Having just bought the paints and materials to make cards just the day before, I took the time to just sit in a room at the church and paint cards for some of the people that I had met in Kyoto to thank them for letting us stay in their houses. A few of the other students wanted to learn how to make them, so I took out a few hours to teach them the basics of the flowers and stems that I was doing. After a few hours, I had some pretty nice looking cards, and I was pleasantly well-rested!