6/7 Kashiwa Temples and Shodou

Hey guys!

So this post is going to play a little catch-up from yesterday and today. After our language class yesterday, we headed to Akebono park - a gorgeous park in Kashiwa that is a short walk away from a buddhist temple. To get to the park itself, you had to walk through this little gift shop that sold snacks and trinkets. Me and some other people got a cone of ice cream, which was very おいしい. I then proceeded to go on a photography rampage of the park. There was a small pool which had koi fish that you could feed, a small playground for kids, and a really pretty field. Here are some pictures from it -

Yes, I'm 19 years old. Yes, I will play in the playground.

There was plenty to see on the way to the temple. There was this field of red flowers that was absolutely stunning. The garden before the temple was also really great. I'm having trouble finding good adjectives to describe this place and not sounds completely cheesy. My pictures don't do it justice. 

And finally -  Tokaiji Temple. This place was amazing. If this is what a temple in a lesser known area is like, I can't even imagine what the temples in Kyoto or Nara will be like. Tokaiji was founded by the order of Emperor Saga , and completed by Lord Honda and 98 Feudal Lords in 1717. The temple itself is painted red with three large ropes hanging in front that is used to bang on these cymbals (I don't actually know the term for these) up above. Apparently you're only supposed to hit them once, but I hit them 3 times. But you're also supposed to hit them loudly and all 3 of my hits were weak, so all together they make one hit. At least, that's my logic right now. The picture from that is from the post I did yesterday. There was also a tall pagoda on the right side of the temple and a little building where people sold good luck charms off on the left. Gravestones and statues of what I think are bodhisattvas were behind. 

Again, I went crazy with taking pictures. Also with having people take pictures of me.

I wasn't really able to get a good picture of the temple itself, but here's a group picture that our sensei had - 

I was dissappointed when we had to leave. Once the group got back to Kashiwa, we all got ramen and I managed to get this really cool shot of the city - 

So I'm finally caught up to today! Today was a little bit more of a chill day. Our morning class was a shodou class, which was both relaxing and nerve wracking. Shodou is a form of calligraphy (our teacher doesn't like us using the word "calligraphy" to describe it, but I don't have a better word for it). There were certain ways that you had to hold the shodou brush, a strict stroke order to the kanji, and different pressures that you had to write the kanji with. The ones that I made and that I like the best were unfortunately smeared with ink from other papers, so here's one that I got a picture of before ruining it - 

This is the kanji for "soil". On the left is my name, pronounced "sa-ma-n-sa"

The teacher would grade our shodou pieces, and unfortunately he would always grade the ones that I feel I did the best in. Nothing about his grading was mean, but he would put orange circles on where he thought that you did good in and fix parts where you need to work on. So the ones I really liked ended up with big orange circles on top of the kanji. Oh well. Here's a group photo of everyone - 

Afterwards we completed our scavenger hunt and met up with some of the students from the university to sing more karaoke. And then we all played Uno. 'Twas a good time. Here's a picture from that - 

And that was all! まったあした！

6/6 Busy Days

Hey guys!

So I won't be able to write much for today. I was out basically the whole day, and when I finally got back to the hotel we all decided to play card games until fairly late. We have to get up early tomorrow, and I want enough time to get ready and such. 

Basically, today we had another Travel Japanese class, went to a beautiful park, and then a nearby temple. The temple was great, and I'm now up to 508 pictures. It's going to be great editing all of them. I also have significantly more video footage when some of the guys decided they were going to start up YouTube channels. 

I'll post more about today tomorrow, but for now here are some of the pictures from the park/temple :)

おやすみなさい！Good night! 

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！

6/4 Kendou

Today after exploring the nearby mall in Kashiwa, we went to a middle school in Kohoku to  learn a little bit about Kendou. We rode the train to Kohoku and took a taxi to the middle school. We had to take off our shoes before entering the school, bow before entering the dojo (at least, I think it's a dojo) , and take off our socks before walking on the hard wood floor. We then watched the kids practice kendou. From what I understood, the class was split between first-year and third-year students. The first-year students did some basic practice moves on each other and the third-years actually sparred.

I was a bit terrified that these 12-14 year-olds were going to beat me to a pulp.

Here are some pictures of the dojo and kids' fighting -

I drew black circles over the kids' faces to hide their identity. :)

After watching the kids fight, we had to try some of the moves ourselves. It was a workout! We learned different ways of how to hit someone, and each way came with a word you had to yell out with volition. My yells usually came out really soft and awkward, though. Towards the end we had to do a combination of moves. One combination was to hit them on the head while yelling "meh", and run to the side of them and across the room. I probably made a huge idiot out of myself but the students' were really friendly and were willing to help us out. During our break, some came up to us to try and talk. The older ones were a lot shyer, but some younger girls seemed really excited to talk to us and we attempted to communicate in broken Japanese. Because the break was only 5 minutes, we couldn't talk too long before getting back to it. 

I didn't get too many pictures beyond this, as I was too busy trying to hit a fourteen year old with a big stick in a proper manner. But here's a video of the upperclassmen really going at it. We were all a bit terrified. 

After the kendou class, we went to go have some ramen and explore a shopping center in Abiko before going back to Kashiwa and playing some uno. Tomorrow will be a yukata class along with our first day of travel Japanese. Hopefully it goes over as great as all the other cultural activities we've done so far! 

6/3 Chuogakuin University and a Tea Ceremony

So today was great. 

We took the bus over to Chuogakuin University to meet some students and our host families. There was a whole welcome party waiting for us, complete with games, great people and great food. We were put into 4 teams, each team having two people from NAU and two from CU. At first it was a little awkward because of the language barrier, but after the games started we all really loosened up. One of the games played a chopsticks game, where you had to grab as many beans as you could with a pair of chopsticks. We also played a short game of trivia, rock paper scissors, and a game where there are an even amount of large white and black cardboard circles and two teams go against each other to see who can flip over the most of their color. It was really fun! We then had some really good food and met our host families. The two hosting me were so nice! I'm still a bit nervous, but definitely not as much as I was. 

Here are some pictures from the university --

Afterwards we had a class on a traditional tea ceremony. Hands down, my favorite part of the ceremony was this here cake -

From what I understand, these cakes are seasonal. This particular one is modeled after a flower that blooms around this time of year. 

The ceremony was fascinating. A big part of a tea ceremony is meditation and appreciation for the bowls used and the tea itself. There's a certain way you must pick up the bowl and drink from it and a certain way to put it back down. I'm really glad I got to experience this. We were also then taught of how to make our own tea. 'Twas very good. 

Later, four of us decided to go to a really nice tea shop with our teacher, a 100 yen shop, and then to a nearby park. I took so many pictures of the park. It was a beautiful and peaceful place. We ended up staying there until sunset before finally heading back to our hotel.

I loved watching the sun set at the park. I took a ton of pictures, and many more to come! 

6/2 Language Barriers, Exploring Kashiwa, and A Tour of Abiko

So the past two days have been pretty interesting. Yesterday, my group and I decided to explore Kashiwa. We spent quite a bit of time at this awesome bookstore, and then later we saw a tech store and realized we should try and get us a wifi hotspot. 

So no one at this store could speak English, and our Japanese is very minimal so we had a bit of a problem. This really nice lady tried really hard to help us out in explaining how much things cost and how much data we can get, despite the language barrier. We finally decided on getting a hotspot and 6GB of data. It was a little pricier than some of the rentals in the airport, but we figured we should get one as soon as possible and if we had problems we could always walk back. 

Well, we had problems. 

The wifi would not work at all, and we spent maybe and 1 1/2 - 2 hours messing around with it to try and get it working. Finally we decided to go back to get some help. We spent another 1 1/2 hours with an attendant who was trying hard to get it working. Finally he realized that we never activated the sim card, and apparently we are supposed to do that. We also have to have a Japanese phone number, which we started low-key panicking about. Our teacher let us use her husband's, which was super nice of her. ありがとうあだち先生！

So yeah I felt super dumb after all of this, but at least now we have wifi. 

That was our first really stressful situation. Other than that, it's been super fun exploring around town. Here are some pictures I took of Kashiwa from yesterday and this afternoon -

 

No, this is not Tokyo. Our teacher said that Kashiwa/Abiko is pretty small. I can't even imagine what Tokyo is like. 

We also went to Mister Donut for a late breakfast yesterday. This is officially my favorite place to eat. The donut I had was so light and fluffy and I didn't feel gross after eating one, unlike American donuts. 

America, get on Japan's level. 

We also came across this really nice kimono/yukata shop. The kimonos that they had on display were gorgeous. I quickly snapped a picture of one. 

Today we rode the train to Abiko and met the mayor. He basically just told us all about the cool things to see and do in Abiko, and we got a picture with him afterwards. 

We then were given a small tour of Abiko. There were some really nice traditional houses that were here and there on the path that we took. We walked to the Sugimura Sokinkan Memorial House and Museum. The museum used to be the house of Sojinkan, a journalist and essayist. His house was also built in as a traditional Japanese house, however he had his own mini library of foreign books dedicated to journalism along with an impressive study room. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get many pictures of his house because pictures were not allowed for most of it. These are the ones I got from the walk to the museum to the museum itself - 

So that was my past two days! Tonight all 8 of us are going to go sing some karaoke. If I'm singing, then I hope people have health insurance. 

6/1 Arriving in Kashiwa

 Last night I finally arrived in Japan! Traveling here was hectic and I'm still exhausted (mainly due to jet lag and the fact that I'm operating on about 4 hours of sleep from the past 2 or 3 nights). Here's a series of events that happened on the way to Japan -

• Our flight from Phoenix to Seattle was delayed, so we ended up being in Seattle 2 hours later than expected.
• I ate a total of 5 full meals. I wasn't expecting Korean Air to feed us as well as they did so I ate twice before the 16 hour flight, then proceeded to gain a food baby through Korean Air. Hey, no complaints here. 

Yes, I took a picture of airplane food. My 5th meal of the day.

• I got burnt on the thigh by seaweed soup. It was great. The flight attendants were so worried that they checked up on me about 5-6 times throughout the flight, and asked if I needed to go to the hospital once we landed in Korea. (Don't worry it's not a bad burn, just a small blister).
• We were supposed to have 50 minutes in Korea to get from one airline to the next, but because of the delays from the Phoenix-Seattle and Seattle-Korea flights we only had 25 minutes to get through the entire Seoul-Incheon airport. Luckily, once we landed a nice crew worker from the next flight was waiting for people that were going to be on the Seoul to Narita flight, and we all got to follow him through the airport. And by follow I mean chase after. Grace and I were sweating and puffing once we got on the plane, the flight attendants immediately gave us a cup of water before we even found our seats. We were still 10 minutes late to that flight, but they were nice enough to not leave without the people coming from the Seattle-Korea flight prior. Props to that crew member who led us to the gate and gave us a good workout to burn off the bibimbap. 

A picture from the plane when first landing in Korea. I didn't get any good ones of landing in Japan since it was already dark out. 

Traveling is so much fun. 

Once we got to Narita, we were so tired and kept getting confused by the train system here. We eventually did figure out how to get to Kashiwa, and after going the exact opposite way of our hotel and realizing that we're a bit lost, I asked a guy for directions and he decided to walk us there himself. Props to that guy as well!

This is the first thing that the 3 of us took pictures of when landing in Narita. We looked like the ultimate tourists. 

So now I'm in my hotel, and I guess I got my own room for at least the first week of this program. Sweet! 

The view from my room. 

And that's the recent update. It's 8:00 a.m. right now, and I'm operating on about 4 hours of sleep from the past 3 days. My traveling companions and I decided to explore the surrounding area a bit, and I'll probably get some coffee while I'm at it.