6/5 Yukata

Today was awesome!

We went to Abiko to have our first lesson in Travel Japanese, and then we headed to the nearby shopping mall to try on some yukata. The room was in the upper part of the mall, where the room itself was styled more traditionally Japanese. It's still a bit strange to me to see traditional Japanese rooms inside incredibly modern buildings. The room that held our tea ceremony was also in a large, modern looking glass building.

Anyway, that's a side tangent.

When we got to the room, the guys won to a game of rock paper scissors and they got to try on the yukata first. Men's yukata aren't as colorful as women's yukata, but they're still nice to look at. There were so many steps to putting on a yukata. It took maybe 20 or so minutes for the guys to get theirs on. Here are pictures of them putting it on -

Us girls had and even longer process. The guys had only one sash (called a koshi-himo) while the girls had two small sashes plus the wide obi to worry about. Before coming on the trip, the teacher took all of our pictures so that the kimono sensei can choose yukata that aesthetically fits all of us. I got to try on this beautiful pink kimono with koi fish designs on it. Here are some pictures of the girls putting it on - 

Afterwards we took a ton of group photos. Today was a great photo opportunity. The senseis also gifted us these really pretty fans so we used that to our advantage when taking these photos

... So I'm just realizing this particular blog post is going to be photo overload. Oh well. After folding up our yukata, our group broke off in 2. Grace, Thomas, and Sherman went to the onsen and the rest of us went to a sushi restaurant. The sushi was 10/10, I wanted to keep eating even though I got full pretty fast, but I actually got more sushi from 7/11 for dinner. We then decided to walk back to the park in Abiko and roam the neighborhoods a bit. Here are some pictures from that little excursion -

"Let's go on an adventure!"

The group dubbed this as "Abbey-ko Road"

Ohh look at me all coy. Hardy har har

Right now I'm with 3 other people watching Wolf of Wall Street. We all tried to get crepes earlier but some restaurants here close pretty early. Because of this, we ended up going to 7/11 where I got my sushi mentioned prior along with some other sweets and such. 'Twas a good day :)

またあした！