Tonight I got a surprise call from one of my friends, Ceili (Kay-lee). She lives right next to me, and we often visit each other. Today she popped up at my door with a last minute invitation and I got ready in two minutes flat. We joined five other people and headed downtown, to a light up at one of the temples. Kiyomizu is a pretty famous temple, and is known for being built on a waterfall. I’d been there twice, but this was the first time I went the whole way through. It was pretty amazing. It wasn’t lit by lanterns or anything as romantic as that, just normal lamps. However, the light bouncing off of the buildings and the autumn leaves created a stunning effect. It was also raining (as it seems to almost every day here in Kyoto), and that seemed to caste a slight fuzzy glow to everything. Or that may have just been the blur of my camera. Nevertheless, it was pretty nice, and I hope to maybe go again before they stop the light up.

Light up night!

(sorry for the sideways picture…)

After the temple, we walked for a bit and found a restaurant. I wasn’t very hungry, so I tried something from and oden. Oden is kind of a weird soup that has chunks of vegetables or meat in it. I ended up getting this:

It’s kind of a tofu bag filled with something that has the consistency of melted mochi. Very… strange. I still don’t know whether I like it or not. My stomach is also unsure… Maybe it just doesn’t know how to digest traditional Japanese foods. I don’t really blame it, though. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to judge what exactly a food is. But that’s really part of the fun. I love not knowing what I’m ordering half the time, and when I do recognize something, I’m almost tempted to get a different mystery food, even if I know what I want. It bothers me all of the people who come to Japan and don’t want to try new things. Or they get tired of this one dish, but aren’t brave enough to try another (as I write this, I know that karma may come and I may have to eat my words… pun not intended). However, I am kind of biased. I love most Japanese food, and have found few dishes that I outright dislike. If I were traveling to a place like India, I may be less adventurous because while I like their food, I do not like all of it. Japanese food in general is simple, most times mushy, and has meat with slabs of fat still attached.

I’ve been here for about two and almost half months now, and I’ve learned a lot in the process of traveling around the city of Kyoto, Japan. The biggest things I’ve come to realize is that tourists are all the same no matter where you go. They are all kind of odd. They are all kind of rude. They are trying their best to see everything that they can while at the same time not realizing they are in a place where people live and work. This may seem like a bold statement or statements depending on which sentences you read. I think I can make a good argument on to why I’m at least slightly correct just based on my experiences here in Kyoto.

When I hurt my back awhile back I had to ride the train to and from school because I didn’t want to hurt my back. Where my school is, there are a lot of sights to see. The train I take even has maps that you can look at to see which stops service the various touristy things around. Over the course of that two weeks that I took the train I saw more then my fair share of tourists being tourists. One particular afternoon a family of four came onto the train all dressed in tank tops and shorts. If that wasn’t a big enough give away that they were tourists, as people in Japan rarely dress that way, they were also wearing huge cameras and were not Japanese looking at all. In fact, these people were German. Now we mostly think of Americans as the loud obnoxious type but I think its honestly just how people are outside of their normal lives. They are loud and obnoxious when they are trying to figure things out. These Germans were not exception. They walked onto the train and started talking at the top of their lungs. Japanese trains are very quiet normally. If you talk, you whisper. You are just being thoughtful. So the second thing that these people did that made me quite ashamed was talk to the driver of the train. Don’t do that as all the trains are on a tight schedule. They all share the same track so that they minimize space and trains pass one another at the stations. Because of this, we don’t talk to the driver. The driver didn’t speak English and the Germans didn’t speak it well to say the least. To hurry on this conversation, I helped out and let the driver be. We finally got it worked out and it turned out the people were on the wrong train so I told them how to get back to where they wanted to go. They got off at the next stop and another crisis in tourism was averted. On a side note, the driver let me ride for free that trip.

I was down at Kyoto Station and decided to go check out the souvenirs in the shops. I decided to go look at the people paying. This was an exercise in not laughing out loud. There was a couple around the age of my parents buying gifts on what I assumed was the last day of their trip. They had found some item that they wanted to buy and took it to the counter. The lady behind the counter was speaking English to them and while it wasn’t wonderful English, it was passable. At least I thought so. The Americans buying the gifts looked like deer looking into the bright lights of international relations. I was just browsing nearby when I was rushed over by the lady. She asked it I spoke Japanese. I said I could and she seemed relieved. I told the person that I was going to speak for the people. The lady told me that she was speaking English and seemed very destraught that these Americans couldn’t understand her. I said just speak Japanese to me and we will leave quickly. The people left and I started speaking in English to the lady and she said she was thankful. I assured her that they just freaked out over something small like a lot of Japanese do when they hear English. It was an odd experience to say the least.

Overall, these two experiences have shown me that everyone in the world has a hard time being a tourist. I personally think its very stress full. Its also amazing to see the tourist from a different point of view here. Everyone just needs to remember to not be rude and be calm. The world will be a better place for it.

The Golden Temple

-Kyle

Holidays in Japan are interesting things. They tend to celebrate the more popular American holidays in the more consumer aspect. Halloween is a good example of this. Halloween in America is a commercial holiday through and through. We have giant shops dedicated to costumes and entire rows of candy in the supermarkets dedicated to Halloween candy. We then have parties that are for grown ups to just dress up in fun costumes. This is very much how Japan views Halloween. The difference is that it isn’t as big here. Things like costume shops popping up around this time aren’t really existent. Instead you’ll have a small section in a store just for costumes and props. There is a store in Kyoto called Loft that had most of a floor dedicated to the Halloween stuff. That was quite fun.

The school I go to had a Halloween party that I attended as the embodiment of America. It took awhile to find everything that I needed for my costume, but most things were found at a $4.00 Store. Its like a nice Dollar Store. So my costume was cheap. Some people had never celebrated Halloween so they went out and bought expensive costumes from Loft and other stores. The party over all was interesting to watch because it was just like a normal party except people were in costume. This is kind of how Japan views things. The interesting part of this was the costumes though. Japan has a strange sense of humor and that was reflected in the costumes. Things like wigs that blow off to make it look like a topee falling off. It did get weirder but its hard to explain. This wasn’t as present in the party I went to. Most people dressed up as zombies or witches. Some people did go all out and make costumes that were pretty cool like this.

Over all Japan views this Holiday as a reason to be different. Its an interesting social observation to say the least. Oh and they don’t really sell Halloween candy. Its sad. Kids don’t really go around trick or treating either. Its just not a Japanese thing to do I guess.

-Kyle

Hello everyone,

First off, we have new pictures! I know it’s exciting. They can be found here. They are pictures of the first three weeks or so. I know I haven’t been updating as regularly as I should but that’s okay because I plan to change that starting right now. Just so I can amuse you, I’ll give a brief rundown of my boring life here.

The first couple of weeks were already covered for the most part but the major thing that happened was covered in my last blog post. I broke my back during the second week of school. It wasn’t too bad, and I’ve healed well. Now I can ride my bike again. The bike has been a wonderful investment. It was about $22.00 total for something I will easily get $23.00 worth of use this year. I need to actually take a picture of the thing at some point It’s a blueish bike that is very typical of an Asian bike. This means that it has no gears and has a front basket. You’d know it if you see it. You could just look it up on your favorite search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, ect.) if you want to know and can’t wait for my pictures.

Now on to school! School is in its fifth or sixth week at this point. I’m not quite sure but it has gone by really fast. I’m finally in my mode of doing school work here. It took quite sometime for it to sit right with me as its quite different then what I’ve been experiencing the past two years at UNM. The classes are structured more like my high school was. At the same time they are more like a University in the sense that they are only once a week if they are normal classes. Mine however are not normal at all. I have different classes that are always with the same people.

Japanese Reading and Writing

This class is a great class. This is the only class that I have everyday but its the only one I really need to have everyday. This is the basic language class. We do vocab, grammer, kanji, and reading everyday. For those who don’t know what kanji is, it’s the writing that is used in Japan. Each character represents an idea and has a meaning. There can be many different ways to actually read the kanji based on the context. Its complicated but makes reading a lot easier since a lot of Japanese words are the same but they just mean different things. So anyways, I have this class everyday but there is a different teacher almost everyday. I have one teacher twice and she’s the nicest one. So it’s a lovely treat. I do have another teacher again but she teaches another class. I should mention that this class is entirely in Japanese. No English is spoken. Fun, huh?

Japanese Culture

This class happens once a week and is taught by a teacher I already have. This class is my most confusing as I have no clue what is going on usually. This class is taught entirely in Japanese as well. I’ve gotten better so this has become less confusing. Still, it’s hard. This class though just focuses on the over all structure of Japanese society, history and various other things. Its a very fun class. I had a test the other day that I did well on. How? I don’t know.

Japanese Speaking and Listening

This class is exactly what it sounds like. This class is all speaking and listening skills. Its ALSO in Japanese but its not as hard as you think it would be. We just talk for the most part and fill in sheets of paper based on all the conversations we hear. The only thing of note we’ve done so far that isn’t just what I described is we had a speech on our home country or in my case, state. I did well. We had to write a speech, she corrected our grammer errors then we read. I really hope that we do something else like this again. One last thing, we have this class twice a week. I really do enjoy it.

Japanese Society

My only class that’s in English. Its a course that focuses on Japanese society and Japan’s role in the world. It’s taught by a guy who has an accent I can’t tell. He’s a very nice guy and has a child on the way. I wish him well.

Japanese Ceramics

This is a fun class that I have for half a day on Saturdays. We just make stuff out of clay. I’ll talk about it more once I have some actual finished product.

So that’s really it for all my class stuff. I think I’ll end this post for now as its approaching one thousand words. I’ll finish with a picture of me doing something weird. In this case, its me in my Halloween costume!

I AM AMERICA!

-Kyle