I apologize for spamming you all but I wanted to get those all done while I was still in Japan.
Still in Japan, you say? Why would I be leaving now, you say, after all that 'Keep Calm and Carry On' bluster in the last post? Well, after the Embassy suggested its non-essential personnel leave the country last week, my school pretty much flipped its shit. It's canceled the Study Abroad program and all SA students have to return home immediately, so I'm flying out tomorrow. To say I'm less than pleased about this would be an understatement, but there's nothing that can be done about it at this point. (Also, both of my best friends here had finally decided to leave, so despite the fact that I was intending to stick out the semester, it would be unbearably lonely here without them for a whole month. Places are nice but they're pretty useless without friends to enjoy them with.)
I've been assured that I'll get credit for all my classes as TUJ hopes to do online classes or something to finish off the semester. (Studying abroad via online classes from my living room at home seems kind of dumb, but like I said, can't be helped at this point.
I spent the last two days having all sorts of fun to make up for being basically kicked out of the country - we went to Akihabara, Ikebukuro, Hibiya, Ebisu, Hamamatsucho, and Ginza; I ate whale bacon, took pictures with Godzilla, did a semester's worth of souvenir shopping in a day, definitely saw Izaya-kun from Durarara!!!, played in a playground, went to all-night karaoke for the second time this week, and were treated to desert on TUJ's dime; that is, we generally had the time of our lives to make up for everything being cut short. (here are some pictures from that :D voila!)
My plane leaves here tomorrow at 5pm JST and after 18 hours of traveling and a 6-hour layover in San Francisco I land in Pittsburgh a measly 7 hours later at 11:45pm EST. So my next post will probably not be from Japanland. But the news ain't all bad. It's not sayounara, just ja mata - since my mom already has tickets to come see me at the end of the semester, she and I will, barring nuclear apocalypse or other extenuating circumstances, probably still be coming back for a vacation filled with fun times. :D
Saturday, March 19, 2011
post from post-earthquake Monday [3/14]
Hi everyone. I just figured I'd pop in and post another "I'm still okay" note. I've been doing fine these last few days. None of the quakes since the first one have been nearly as bad (although a nearly-minute long aftershock did wake me up in the middle of the night). We spent most of Saturday lurking around our apartment (we were warned to stay inside after the news of the first explosion at the Fukushima reactor broke and no one was quite sure what kind of explosion it was.) Since then we've been trying to keep up a level of normalcy, which is not that hard despite the constant flow of more bad news. My area has been blessedly unaffected so far, and the only sign that something's wrong is that all the instant-food shelves in the grocery stores are completely empty, and the stores are all packed with people.
Yesterday we went to Yoyogi Park near Harajuku with the intent to walk around and kick a soccer ball for a while. We ended up engaged in the dirtiest, most fun game of soccer I've ever played. It was a trilingual game with me and my two friends teamed up with/versus a Spanish guy and his kids and and a bunch of bratty Japanese kids who kicked, grabbed, pulled, and did just about anything to win (and also complained about being put on the girls' team).
It was really reassuring to see everyone out having a normal day in the park, although the trains and stations were far emptier than usual.
They have scheduled blackouts to start soon to conserve power so it can be directed to areas that need it more. They were supposed to start today but they postponed them a day because people were mostly home and conserving energy anyway. We didn't have school today because of the blackouts and various train stoppages/reschedulings. (We don't have it tomorrow either.)
Today the weather was really nice, so I went out and sat in the parking lot of our apartment building (we don't have a yard) for the afternoon and caught up on some school and for-fun reading.
A lot of people in my building are trying to get the hell out of dodge. One girl with dual Austrian-American citizenship got the Austrian Embassy to help her get a flight out (or so I've heard). Another girl was forced to leave by her parents; some other people are going home too. A few guys from my dorm are going to Osaka to stay with friends for the week since it's much farther from both the Fukushima plant and the current earthquake warning area.
Right now I have no plans to go anywhere. It seems silly to me to fearmonger about things that may or may not happen, and over the happening of which I have absolutely zero control. I'm not saying that earthquakes and the threat of nuclear meltdown don't scare me, or that they absolutely can't happen. But all the news I've seen leads me to be cautiously optimistic rather than over-cautious. If I'm being a cock-eyed optimist then sue me. From what I know of radiation I'd be in more danger from a CT scan than the current emission levels in Fukushima. But I'm determined to stay until it's clear that not staying would be a very bad idea. I'm not so proud that I'll go down with the ship as it were, but right now in the face of such unclear news I'm not ready to go anywhere yet.
In fact, in lieu of skipping the country, I'm going to karaoke instead. >.>' No sense sitting around angsting when there's fun to be had. >.<
Yesterday we went to Yoyogi Park near Harajuku with the intent to walk around and kick a soccer ball for a while. We ended up engaged in the dirtiest, most fun game of soccer I've ever played. It was a trilingual game with me and my two friends teamed up with/versus a Spanish guy and his kids and and a bunch of bratty Japanese kids who kicked, grabbed, pulled, and did just about anything to win (and also complained about being put on the girls' team).
It was really reassuring to see everyone out having a normal day in the park, although the trains and stations were far emptier than usual.
They have scheduled blackouts to start soon to conserve power so it can be directed to areas that need it more. They were supposed to start today but they postponed them a day because people were mostly home and conserving energy anyway. We didn't have school today because of the blackouts and various train stoppages/reschedulings. (We don't have it tomorrow either.)
Today the weather was really nice, so I went out and sat in the parking lot of our apartment building (we don't have a yard) for the afternoon and caught up on some school and for-fun reading.
A lot of people in my building are trying to get the hell out of dodge. One girl with dual Austrian-American citizenship got the Austrian Embassy to help her get a flight out (or so I've heard). Another girl was forced to leave by her parents; some other people are going home too. A few guys from my dorm are going to Osaka to stay with friends for the week since it's much farther from both the Fukushima plant and the current earthquake warning area.
Right now I have no plans to go anywhere. It seems silly to me to fearmonger about things that may or may not happen, and over the happening of which I have absolutely zero control. I'm not saying that earthquakes and the threat of nuclear meltdown don't scare me, or that they absolutely can't happen. But all the news I've seen leads me to be cautiously optimistic rather than over-cautious. If I'm being a cock-eyed optimist then sue me. From what I know of radiation I'd be in more danger from a CT scan than the current emission levels in Fukushima. But I'm determined to stay until it's clear that not staying would be a very bad idea. I'm not so proud that I'll go down with the ship as it were, but right now in the face of such unclear news I'm not ready to go anywhere yet.
In fact, in lieu of skipping the country, I'm going to karaoke instead. >.>' No sense sitting around angsting when there's fun to be had. >.<
post-earthquake update
Hi all. Despite being in Tokyo during the quakes, I am alive and well although aftershocks are continuing to come through and scare the pants off of me. It was pretty terrifying today; we had to evacuate the building twice in a row (after which they canceled classes). They stopped all the trains in the area until (I'm pretty sure) Sunday. Thankfully, I live only about five miles/eight km from the school so I was able to walk back to my apartment with some friends.
Also, the gas and water in my apartment are fine. The gas is set to automatically turn off in the case of an earthquake, which is reassuring.
My thoughts and prayers go out to all the dead or injured as well as all those stranded without shelter because of the train stoppages.
[written 3/11 - I hadn't posted it here but I figured I would copy it over for historical purposes.]
Also, the gas and water in my apartment are fine. The gas is set to automatically turn off in the case of an earthquake, which is reassuring.
My thoughts and prayers go out to all the dead or injured as well as all those stranded without shelter because of the train stoppages.
[written 3/11 - I hadn't posted it here but I figured I would copy it over for historical purposes.]
Journey to the West: Osaka
Pics from Osaka are here.
Osaka was also awesome, although we ended up not seeing everything we would have liked to. On arriving we wandered around a bit before finding our hotel but eventually were able to check in and drop off our bags and stuff. We took a break then, splitting up to nap/otherwise recharge, as we'd left the capsule hotel in Kyoto at around 7:45 that morning and had done a LOT since then. When I woke up my roommate was nowhere to be found, so Michael and I went off on our own to explore and eat dinner. On top of a building near our hotel was a giant ferris wheel called the Hep-5, so we went off to that to go around once and see the city from way up high at night (it was only around 6pm or so, but it was very dark out already). It was really cool despite the fact that I'm slightly terrified of heights. (I don't have any pictures from up there, unfortunately, because I wasn't sure how well my phone's camera would work in the dark...)
After that we had dinner in a little chain restaurant and headed back to the hotel; my phone had died and we were still pretty tired, so we spent the rest of the night relaxing and catching up on internet business and sleep. (We also charted a course for the following day.)
The next morning we ate breakfast at the hotel's buffet and checked our bags into the hotel's back room so we didn't have to drag them around all day. We had been given passes by the group leaders that were good for entry into some museums/whatnot as well as fora limeted number of subway lines. The first place we went was Osaka Castle, which is huge and giant and other adjectives that imply largeness as well as many adjectives that mean beautiful. :D The grounds of the castle are simply enormous, as is the moat. We walked through the grounds for a while before going into the castle itself, which is now a museum dedicated to the castle's history, especially to Hideyoshi, the Tokugawa-era shogun who built the castle. (The castle that currently stands there is a replica; however, Hideyoshi's original castle was burnt to the ground centuries ago.)
The museum has you start on the eighth floor, which is basically an observation deck. We could see the ferris wheel by our hotel from it! The rest of the floors had various displays and replicas and artifacts and videos and infographics, etc., that talked about different historical events and people tied to the castle's history. After buying a bunch of souvenirs in the gift shop there, we had some takoyaki from a stand for lunch and headed off to our next destination.
From here we had a series of failures - the next place we intended to go was a Buddhist temple that apparently had a shrine built of human bones. However, the temple was really far from the stop we had to get off at, and after walking for a ways we decided to move on to bigger and better things. (We later learned that it was one altar made of cremated ashes, which is nowhere NEAR as cool. Never trust hearsay, kids.) Unfortunately this put us behind schedule, so we had to rush the rest of our adventures.
The next place we went was Namba, where there is an underground shopping center. We split up and wandered for a set amount of time before returning and getting back on the train to try and get in one more thing before we had to meet up with the group again. (I bought an awesome hat there! :D)
The final place we wanted to go was a place called the Floating Gardens, which is a giant garden that forms the top bar of a skyscraper built to look like a doorframe-type shape. Unfortunately, time was too short and it was too far away, so we only saw it from a distance...
After that, we went back to the hotel and picked up our suitcases and met up with the rest of the group. (I also popped into a Family Mart and bought some FMA folders, random but whatever. :D) We headed to the main Osaka station where we boarded the shinkansen and headed back to Tokyo. A few hours later we arrived at Shinagawa station and hopped off to go our separate ways. All in all the trip was a great experience despite a few swings-and-misses as far as sightseeing was concerned, and because of the shinkansen I actually got my homework done too! Crazy, I know right.
The Journey to the West ends here - that's all folks. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Osaka was also awesome, although we ended up not seeing everything we would have liked to. On arriving we wandered around a bit before finding our hotel but eventually were able to check in and drop off our bags and stuff. We took a break then, splitting up to nap/otherwise recharge, as we'd left the capsule hotel in Kyoto at around 7:45 that morning and had done a LOT since then. When I woke up my roommate was nowhere to be found, so Michael and I went off on our own to explore and eat dinner. On top of a building near our hotel was a giant ferris wheel called the Hep-5, so we went off to that to go around once and see the city from way up high at night (it was only around 6pm or so, but it was very dark out already). It was really cool despite the fact that I'm slightly terrified of heights. (I don't have any pictures from up there, unfortunately, because I wasn't sure how well my phone's camera would work in the dark...)
After that we had dinner in a little chain restaurant and headed back to the hotel; my phone had died and we were still pretty tired, so we spent the rest of the night relaxing and catching up on internet business and sleep. (We also charted a course for the following day.)
The next morning we ate breakfast at the hotel's buffet and checked our bags into the hotel's back room so we didn't have to drag them around all day. We had been given passes by the group leaders that were good for entry into some museums/whatnot as well as fora limeted number of subway lines. The first place we went was Osaka Castle, which is huge and giant and other adjectives that imply largeness as well as many adjectives that mean beautiful. :D The grounds of the castle are simply enormous, as is the moat. We walked through the grounds for a while before going into the castle itself, which is now a museum dedicated to the castle's history, especially to Hideyoshi, the Tokugawa-era shogun who built the castle. (The castle that currently stands there is a replica; however, Hideyoshi's original castle was burnt to the ground centuries ago.)
The museum has you start on the eighth floor, which is basically an observation deck. We could see the ferris wheel by our hotel from it! The rest of the floors had various displays and replicas and artifacts and videos and infographics, etc., that talked about different historical events and people tied to the castle's history. After buying a bunch of souvenirs in the gift shop there, we had some takoyaki from a stand for lunch and headed off to our next destination.
From here we had a series of failures - the next place we intended to go was a Buddhist temple that apparently had a shrine built of human bones. However, the temple was really far from the stop we had to get off at, and after walking for a ways we decided to move on to bigger and better things. (We later learned that it was one altar made of cremated ashes, which is nowhere NEAR as cool. Never trust hearsay, kids.) Unfortunately this put us behind schedule, so we had to rush the rest of our adventures.
The next place we went was Namba, where there is an underground shopping center. We split up and wandered for a set amount of time before returning and getting back on the train to try and get in one more thing before we had to meet up with the group again. (I bought an awesome hat there! :D)
The final place we wanted to go was a place called the Floating Gardens, which is a giant garden that forms the top bar of a skyscraper built to look like a doorframe-type shape. Unfortunately, time was too short and it was too far away, so we only saw it from a distance...
After that, we went back to the hotel and picked up our suitcases and met up with the rest of the group. (I also popped into a Family Mart and bought some FMA folders, random but whatever. :D) We headed to the main Osaka station where we boarded the shinkansen and headed back to Tokyo. A few hours later we arrived at Shinagawa station and hopped off to go our separate ways. All in all the trip was a great experience despite a few swings-and-misses as far as sightseeing was concerned, and because of the shinkansen I actually got my homework done too! Crazy, I know right.
The Journey to the West ends here - that's all folks. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Journey to the West: Nara
Pics of Nara are here. There are fewer and they're all portrait-oriented because my actual camera crapped out as we were leaving Kyoto and I took all of these with my cell phone.
Nara was a very rural area, especially compared to the rest of the places we went during the course of the weekend. (Miyajima was by no means urban, but it had a different feel that I wouldn't use 'rural' to describe, idk.) It was pretty cold there, and you could still see the snow on the mountains around it.
So the thing Nara's famous for is deer. There are freaking deer everywhere. So the first thing we did was walk to the deer park to see all the deer. We wandered around there for a while, feeding the deer and watching the fear in the eyes of people who had also bought crackers for the deer and were being mobbed by them. My roommate thought the deer were literally the cutest thing on God's earth; I heard "Ooooh, over here Shika-chan!" more times that day than I could count (shika means deer). They were cute - I just wasn't as enthralled with them as she was.
After hanging with the deer for a while we checked out the Kasuga Taisha shrine, which is a Shinto shrine that's a ridiculous amount of centuries old. It was really impressive but it was a relatively long walk to get to the shrine from the road, and it had started to rain a little. We stopped in a souvenir shop and had lunch before heading on. The shrine had immense grounds and was really cool, but at this point I was starting to think that if you've seen a few Shinto shrines, you've seen them all - there isn't much variety in architecture and stuff, which is why places like Fushimi-Inari that I mentioned in my last entry are so exciting.
At that point I wanted to see the Buddhist temple as well, (we were on a bit of a timeline, as we were supposed to meet in Osaka to check into the hotel there at a certain time) so we headed back to the road and towards Todaiji where the giant Vairocana Buddha statue is. It's the largest in the world (15m/50ft tall) and was really incredibly impressive. Pictures really don't do it justice-it was really quite breathtaking in real life. There was also a slightly smaller statue of the Goddess of Mercy aka the Bodhisattva Kannon/Guanyin/Kanzeon Botatsu/Avalokitesavara (she has a lot of different names). Of all the figures I know of in the traditions of other religions, Guanyin is my favorite ever, so I was pretty excited.
At this point it was still raining, and I had made the terrible choice of wearing pants that dragged on the ground a little. This wouldn't have been a problem except for the deer - where there are hundreds of deer there is a a metric fuckton of deer poop, unfortunately, and it mixed with the water on the ground to form a nasty poop-mud that made my pants wet to about mid-shin. We headed back to the station after seeing the Buddha so I could change into my other pair of jeans (stopping briefly so I could buy a shinsengumi headband) and then bought tickets and hopped on the train to Osaka.
Nara was a very rural area, especially compared to the rest of the places we went during the course of the weekend. (Miyajima was by no means urban, but it had a different feel that I wouldn't use 'rural' to describe, idk.) It was pretty cold there, and you could still see the snow on the mountains around it.
So the thing Nara's famous for is deer. There are freaking deer everywhere. So the first thing we did was walk to the deer park to see all the deer. We wandered around there for a while, feeding the deer and watching the fear in the eyes of people who had also bought crackers for the deer and were being mobbed by them. My roommate thought the deer were literally the cutest thing on God's earth; I heard "Ooooh, over here Shika-chan!" more times that day than I could count (shika means deer). They were cute - I just wasn't as enthralled with them as she was.
After hanging with the deer for a while we checked out the Kasuga Taisha shrine, which is a Shinto shrine that's a ridiculous amount of centuries old. It was really impressive but it was a relatively long walk to get to the shrine from the road, and it had started to rain a little. We stopped in a souvenir shop and had lunch before heading on. The shrine had immense grounds and was really cool, but at this point I was starting to think that if you've seen a few Shinto shrines, you've seen them all - there isn't much variety in architecture and stuff, which is why places like Fushimi-Inari that I mentioned in my last entry are so exciting.
At that point I wanted to see the Buddhist temple as well, (we were on a bit of a timeline, as we were supposed to meet in Osaka to check into the hotel there at a certain time) so we headed back to the road and towards Todaiji where the giant Vairocana Buddha statue is. It's the largest in the world (15m/50ft tall) and was really incredibly impressive. Pictures really don't do it justice-it was really quite breathtaking in real life. There was also a slightly smaller statue of the Goddess of Mercy aka the Bodhisattva Kannon/Guanyin/Kanzeon Botatsu/Avalokitesavara (she has a lot of different names). Of all the figures I know of in the traditions of other religions, Guanyin is my favorite ever, so I was pretty excited.
At this point it was still raining, and I had made the terrible choice of wearing pants that dragged on the ground a little. This wouldn't have been a problem except for the deer - where there are hundreds of deer there is a a metric fuckton of deer poop, unfortunately, and it mixed with the water on the ground to form a nasty poop-mud that made my pants wet to about mid-shin. We headed back to the station after seeing the Buddha so I could change into my other pair of jeans (stopping briefly so I could buy a shinsengumi headband) and then bought tickets and hopped on the train to Osaka.
Journey to the West: Kyoto
Pics from Kyoto are here. (Avoiding hater flickr, because it wouldn't let me upload more pics. >.>)
We left Miyajima and rode a train to the station in Hiroshima where we could board the shinkansen (the bullet train). We had some free time to wander around the station and buy souvenirs and whatnot before we boarded the train, so I got some stuff for my family as well as a snack for the train ride: delicious citrus-flavored kit-kats! They are a regional specialty (only sold in the Chugoku region of Japan) and they were totally dericious! They tasted like creamsicles. :D
Boarding the shinkansen was an adventure in and of itself - say your train is scheduled to leave at 10:56? The train pulls in at 10:56, you get the hell on, and then it leaves at 10:56. Needless to say with a group of almost 30 with luggage trying to board the same car, it was interesting. >.> The ride itself was pretty uneventful aside from the fact that it was SO COOL. I mean, you hear about how fast the bullet trains are but you don't really realize it until you're on one and you're really just tearing through the countryside. I took some pictures from the window but I'd be surprised if any of them are not blurry.
The first thing we did when arriving in Kyoto was to get on a different (local) train, which took us to our lodging for the night, a capsule hotel! We were able to drop off our luggage in the lobby of the hotel, leaving us free to wander about for the day.
Our hotel was blessedly close to a bunch of exciting things, and one of our group leaders (from the school office) had a recommended path through them to see as many cool things as possible in the least amount of time. The first thing we did was to go to stroll through the Gion district, which is the famous geisha entertainment district. (Most of the buildings were unfortunately closed since it was the middle of the day, though, so we didn't see any geisha. :/) The street was really cool though because all of the buildings were very traditional and most had gated gardens separating them from the public roadway.
Next we went to see a Shinto shrine. Kyoto is famous for its shrines and temples - there are hundreds of them in the city and surrounding area/mountains. Yasaka Shrine was really cool - there were loads of little side shrines and statues as well as some big pavilions. We saw a wedding party in traditional garb and sniped some pics of them. We wandered around inside the shrine for a while and then headed out again on our way to the next stop, Kiyomizu Temple.
Along the way we popped in and out of a bunch of cute little shops. In one I bought a good-luck cat for a souvenir, and couldn't remember what the word for them was in Japanese. I thought it was ma-neko or something similar, and then a friend was like 'bake-neko'? Which means monster-cat, which gave the lady checking me out a good laugh. It's 'maneki-neko', by the way. We stopped in a little cafe for lunch/a snack (as in I got dessert and Jenny and Mike got food and dessert). I had green-tea ice cream with red bean jelly and shirotama (rice paste/mochi balls) on top. It was quite tasty. :D
After eating we continued on towards the temple. That was when we saw one of the most exciting things about out Kyoto trip: a geisha house with its garden doors open and four maiko inside in full geisha makeup and attire having a professional photoshoot done. We creeped on it hella hard and took a bunch of pics - they were so graceful and beautiful and very doll-like.
After that and a lot of wandering, we finally ended up at Kiyomizu Temple on top of a big hill on the edge of Kyoto. It was vary pretty, and we could see a panoramic view of the city from up there, which was amazing. It was just starting to get a little dark, and we had other plans yet, so although there was a path you could take to go see a waterfall up on the mountain, we opted to keep going. We meandered back down the hill slowly, stopping to buy ice cream at a little stand (I had sakura flavor! It was strange and delicious!) We walked back to the giant Kyoto station to hop on a train out to a shrine a ways away from the rest of our scripted plan. On the way we got to see Kyoto Tower, which is built on top of a Yodobashi electronics store, starting to light up for the night.
The shrine we went to was Fushimi-Inari Shrine, which is quite possibly one of the coolest places ever. It was already dark when we got there, so we were concerned that our pictures wouldn't come out well, but using flash actually made them AWESOME. The draw of Fushimi-Inari shrine is the torii. (Torii are Shinto shrine gates, usually laquered red.) There are pathways all over the area there that are literally walled in with the torii, making basically a tunnel. There were very few people there, and we wandered around spinning mysterious and scary stories about all the spirits that might be lingering there until we literally terrified ourselves, jumping at a sound we couldn't find the source of and finally skedaddling because we couldn't deal haha. ^^;
From there we got on the train back into downtown Kyoto and met back up with the big group to go to dinner. They had arranged an all-you-can-eat meal at a buffet near the station. We ate ourselves silly. After eating, it was pretty late and most of the shops had closed. We opted to walk back to the hotel to work off some of the enormous amount of Japanese food we had just ingested.
When we arrived back at the hotel it was to a scene of discord - the hotel had accidentally booked the girls on boys' floors and vice versa. As the girls outnumbered the boys by a lot it was a problem. They eventually just blocked off a whole floor for TUJ students and we were fine, although our group leaders argued a refund out of the place for the girls who had to sleep on the guys' floor. And I got to confuse the hell out of the Japanese men when I got on the mens' elevator.
(Quick explanation of capsule hotels if you've never heard of them: They're really inexpensive places to literally do nothing but crash for a night - they eschew an actual hotel room for stacked rows of single-bed-sized capsules. You climb into the pod and pull down a screen for privacy in order to sleep. The hotels are set up with men's and women's floors to ensure that no one's sexins interfere with other peoples' sleep. The women's elevators only access women's floors and vice versa for the men. One floor of each section has showers and bathroom facilities, so in order to shower I had to go all the way down to the lobby and back up again. The hotel also provides you with pajamas, slippers, toothpaste/toothbrush, and showering materials, which was handy.)
So that was pretty frustrating, and we had to be on the road pretty early the next day, but we finally got ourselves set up and hit the sack in our little pods, which was really cool, actually, and rather comfortable as well.
The next morning we got up early (the pods use a ambient light alarm to wake you up so alarms don't bother the other customers - the lights get gradually brighter and then turn on completely at the time you set, so you wake up gradually and silently. I didn't trust it to actually wake me up, as I'd slept through an earthquake in the past, but it worked perfectly!) and headed out to the station. We had basically a free day that day - we could wander around Kyoto again, or take a train to Nara, or go straight to Osaka, as long as we ended up in Osaka at the end of the day. We wanted to go to Nara, since we had seen most of the things we wanted to see in Kyoto (I'd have liked to see the Manga Museum and Kinkakuji/Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but they would have been a significant time drain...) and we had most of Sunday to see Osaka. It's only like Y600 (about $6 USD) to get between all three cities since they're so close, so we bought our tickets and hopped on the train. :D
We left Miyajima and rode a train to the station in Hiroshima where we could board the shinkansen (the bullet train). We had some free time to wander around the station and buy souvenirs and whatnot before we boarded the train, so I got some stuff for my family as well as a snack for the train ride: delicious citrus-flavored kit-kats! They are a regional specialty (only sold in the Chugoku region of Japan) and they were totally dericious! They tasted like creamsicles. :D
Boarding the shinkansen was an adventure in and of itself - say your train is scheduled to leave at 10:56? The train pulls in at 10:56, you get the hell on, and then it leaves at 10:56. Needless to say with a group of almost 30 with luggage trying to board the same car, it was interesting. >.> The ride itself was pretty uneventful aside from the fact that it was SO COOL. I mean, you hear about how fast the bullet trains are but you don't really realize it until you're on one and you're really just tearing through the countryside. I took some pictures from the window but I'd be surprised if any of them are not blurry.
The first thing we did when arriving in Kyoto was to get on a different (local) train, which took us to our lodging for the night, a capsule hotel! We were able to drop off our luggage in the lobby of the hotel, leaving us free to wander about for the day.
Our hotel was blessedly close to a bunch of exciting things, and one of our group leaders (from the school office) had a recommended path through them to see as many cool things as possible in the least amount of time. The first thing we did was to go to stroll through the Gion district, which is the famous geisha entertainment district. (Most of the buildings were unfortunately closed since it was the middle of the day, though, so we didn't see any geisha. :/) The street was really cool though because all of the buildings were very traditional and most had gated gardens separating them from the public roadway.
Next we went to see a Shinto shrine. Kyoto is famous for its shrines and temples - there are hundreds of them in the city and surrounding area/mountains. Yasaka Shrine was really cool - there were loads of little side shrines and statues as well as some big pavilions. We saw a wedding party in traditional garb and sniped some pics of them. We wandered around inside the shrine for a while and then headed out again on our way to the next stop, Kiyomizu Temple.
Along the way we popped in and out of a bunch of cute little shops. In one I bought a good-luck cat for a souvenir, and couldn't remember what the word for them was in Japanese. I thought it was ma-neko or something similar, and then a friend was like 'bake-neko'? Which means monster-cat, which gave the lady checking me out a good laugh. It's 'maneki-neko', by the way. We stopped in a little cafe for lunch/a snack (as in I got dessert and Jenny and Mike got food and dessert). I had green-tea ice cream with red bean jelly and shirotama (rice paste/mochi balls) on top. It was quite tasty. :D
After eating we continued on towards the temple. That was when we saw one of the most exciting things about out Kyoto trip: a geisha house with its garden doors open and four maiko inside in full geisha makeup and attire having a professional photoshoot done. We creeped on it hella hard and took a bunch of pics - they were so graceful and beautiful and very doll-like.
After that and a lot of wandering, we finally ended up at Kiyomizu Temple on top of a big hill on the edge of Kyoto. It was vary pretty, and we could see a panoramic view of the city from up there, which was amazing. It was just starting to get a little dark, and we had other plans yet, so although there was a path you could take to go see a waterfall up on the mountain, we opted to keep going. We meandered back down the hill slowly, stopping to buy ice cream at a little stand (I had sakura flavor! It was strange and delicious!) We walked back to the giant Kyoto station to hop on a train out to a shrine a ways away from the rest of our scripted plan. On the way we got to see Kyoto Tower, which is built on top of a Yodobashi electronics store, starting to light up for the night.
The shrine we went to was Fushimi-Inari Shrine, which is quite possibly one of the coolest places ever. It was already dark when we got there, so we were concerned that our pictures wouldn't come out well, but using flash actually made them AWESOME. The draw of Fushimi-Inari shrine is the torii. (Torii are Shinto shrine gates, usually laquered red.) There are pathways all over the area there that are literally walled in with the torii, making basically a tunnel. There were very few people there, and we wandered around spinning mysterious and scary stories about all the spirits that might be lingering there until we literally terrified ourselves, jumping at a sound we couldn't find the source of and finally skedaddling because we couldn't deal haha. ^^;
From there we got on the train back into downtown Kyoto and met back up with the big group to go to dinner. They had arranged an all-you-can-eat meal at a buffet near the station. We ate ourselves silly. After eating, it was pretty late and most of the shops had closed. We opted to walk back to the hotel to work off some of the enormous amount of Japanese food we had just ingested.
When we arrived back at the hotel it was to a scene of discord - the hotel had accidentally booked the girls on boys' floors and vice versa. As the girls outnumbered the boys by a lot it was a problem. They eventually just blocked off a whole floor for TUJ students and we were fine, although our group leaders argued a refund out of the place for the girls who had to sleep on the guys' floor. And I got to confuse the hell out of the Japanese men when I got on the mens' elevator.
(Quick explanation of capsule hotels if you've never heard of them: They're really inexpensive places to literally do nothing but crash for a night - they eschew an actual hotel room for stacked rows of single-bed-sized capsules. You climb into the pod and pull down a screen for privacy in order to sleep. The hotels are set up with men's and women's floors to ensure that no one's sexins interfere with other peoples' sleep. The women's elevators only access women's floors and vice versa for the men. One floor of each section has showers and bathroom facilities, so in order to shower I had to go all the way down to the lobby and back up again. The hotel also provides you with pajamas, slippers, toothpaste/toothbrush, and showering materials, which was handy.)
So that was pretty frustrating, and we had to be on the road pretty early the next day, but we finally got ourselves set up and hit the sack in our little pods, which was really cool, actually, and rather comfortable as well.
The next morning we got up early (the pods use a ambient light alarm to wake you up so alarms don't bother the other customers - the lights get gradually brighter and then turn on completely at the time you set, so you wake up gradually and silently. I didn't trust it to actually wake me up, as I'd slept through an earthquake in the past, but it worked perfectly!) and headed out to the station. We had basically a free day that day - we could wander around Kyoto again, or take a train to Nara, or go straight to Osaka, as long as we ended up in Osaka at the end of the day. We wanted to go to Nara, since we had seen most of the things we wanted to see in Kyoto (I'd have liked to see the Manga Museum and Kinkakuji/Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but they would have been a significant time drain...) and we had most of Sunday to see Osaka. It's only like Y600 (about $6 USD) to get between all three cities since they're so close, so we bought our tickets and hopped on the train. :D
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Journey to the West: Miyajima
The next stop on our trip across Japan was a little island just 30 minutes East-ish of Hiroshima, ostensibly in the Inland Sea. (pics are here)
We took the ferry straight from the Peace Park to the island, about a half an hour or so's ride during which I fought sleep desperately, the miserable bus-nap I had taken the night before not quite sufficing. >.> However, when we arrived at the island, we had to race to our lodging to drop off our stuff, which was less than fun... (that's why all the pics at the beginning were sort of blurry - they were taken mid speed-walk). Apparently Miyajima is full of tame deer; (on a scale of one to Nara it barely rated, but you know whatevs). The deer were totally chill around people and would jump you for food. (We realized this danger quickly.)
We walked past a bunch of temples including a great big one set into the bay, as well as various pagodas and shrines. Then we snaked through a residential area, and finally pulled up to our ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn. IT WAS SO COOL. Very old-school, like tatami-mat floors and rice paper screens in the rooms. Awesomeness.
After splitting up into our rooms, we headed out to see the island before the temples closed and the sun went down. We first went to Itsukushima Shrine, which was the big shrine in the bay that we passed. It's built on the beach on stilts, so that when the tide comes in it looks like the building is floating :O (We unfortunately didn't see it then, though... :/) We went in and took a bunch of pictures of the Ootorii (the giant red shrine gate that is out on the water) from the pier inside the shrine) and then wandered around the beach for a while checking out the sights and trying to get a little closer to the torii - the tide wasn't out far enough to get out there. but I went out as far as I could (probably gaijin-photobombing a million Japanese pictures, but whatevs >.> haha)
After that we split off from the main group for a little while and explored the backroads of the island a bit - it was an island after all, so we were pretty sure we wouldn't get lost. We found a big tree that looked like a definite totoro habitat :D and also got some really cool pictures of the bay from high up. After wandering a little more (and doing some souvenir-shopping) we headed back to the lodge for dinner.
Dinner was a literally enormous feast with like eight or nine tiny dishes per person. I don't eat a lot of fish or vegetables, but that was pretty much all they gave us and I wasn't gonna waste it, haha. We had a leisurely dinner, and then I donned my yukata (a casual sort of kimono provided by the inn) and went downstairs to live it up in the public bath. The set-up is like this: there are girls' and boys' sides, and you basically get undressed, wash up, and then luxuriously soak in a giant hot tub for as long as you can stand it. *__* it was wonderful. :D
After that we lounged about the room for some time just surfing the web, doing some homework, and getting to know each other (we were grouped up pretty randomly for rooms, so I didn't really know two of the girls at all). Finally we set up our futons on the floor and settled in for the night pretty early.
We had to get up early the next morning, as we had to get the first ferry off the island in order to get the train to the Hiroshima shinkansen (bullet train) station in order to get on the right shinkansen to Kyoto. Before we left, though, I had another delicious traditional-style meal for breakfast, and got to try Japanese maple candy! :D And that's the tale of our trip to Miyajima. :D
Sorry this took a while to post... real life is, how you say, fuben.
We took the ferry straight from the Peace Park to the island, about a half an hour or so's ride during which I fought sleep desperately, the miserable bus-nap I had taken the night before not quite sufficing. >.> However, when we arrived at the island, we had to race to our lodging to drop off our stuff, which was less than fun... (that's why all the pics at the beginning were sort of blurry - they were taken mid speed-walk). Apparently Miyajima is full of tame deer; (on a scale of one to Nara it barely rated, but you know whatevs). The deer were totally chill around people and would jump you for food. (We realized this danger quickly.)
We walked past a bunch of temples including a great big one set into the bay, as well as various pagodas and shrines. Then we snaked through a residential area, and finally pulled up to our ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn. IT WAS SO COOL. Very old-school, like tatami-mat floors and rice paper screens in the rooms. Awesomeness.
After splitting up into our rooms, we headed out to see the island before the temples closed and the sun went down. We first went to Itsukushima Shrine, which was the big shrine in the bay that we passed. It's built on the beach on stilts, so that when the tide comes in it looks like the building is floating :O (We unfortunately didn't see it then, though... :/) We went in and took a bunch of pictures of the Ootorii (the giant red shrine gate that is out on the water) from the pier inside the shrine) and then wandered around the beach for a while checking out the sights and trying to get a little closer to the torii - the tide wasn't out far enough to get out there. but I went out as far as I could (probably gaijin-photobombing a million Japanese pictures, but whatevs >.> haha)
After that we split off from the main group for a little while and explored the backroads of the island a bit - it was an island after all, so we were pretty sure we wouldn't get lost. We found a big tree that looked like a definite totoro habitat :D and also got some really cool pictures of the bay from high up. After wandering a little more (and doing some souvenir-shopping) we headed back to the lodge for dinner.
Dinner was a literally enormous feast with like eight or nine tiny dishes per person. I don't eat a lot of fish or vegetables, but that was pretty much all they gave us and I wasn't gonna waste it, haha. We had a leisurely dinner, and then I donned my yukata (a casual sort of kimono provided by the inn) and went downstairs to live it up in the public bath. The set-up is like this: there are girls' and boys' sides, and you basically get undressed, wash up, and then luxuriously soak in a giant hot tub for as long as you can stand it. *__* it was wonderful. :D
After that we lounged about the room for some time just surfing the web, doing some homework, and getting to know each other (we were grouped up pretty randomly for rooms, so I didn't really know two of the girls at all). Finally we set up our futons on the floor and settled in for the night pretty early.
We had to get up early the next morning, as we had to get the first ferry off the island in order to get the train to the Hiroshima shinkansen (bullet train) station in order to get on the right shinkansen to Kyoto. Before we left, though, I had another delicious traditional-style meal for breakfast, and got to try Japanese maple candy! :D And that's the tale of our trip to Miyajima. :D
Sorry this took a while to post... real life is, how you say, fuben.
Journey to the West: Hiroshima
Pics for this entry are here at photobucket because flickr seems to think that 700+ pictures is too much. Rude.
Please be warned before looking that the Hiroshima Peace Museum is filled with displays and artifacts that unflinchingly show the results of an atomic blast on human beings, and that many are upsetting and/or graphic and/or triggery.
So our Watern Japan trip. It was epic, and fun, and exhausting, and a little ridiculous. We started out running five minutes late, getting separated from the group, and thinking we were going to be left behind in Tokyo forever. >.>
Once we met up with our group, I immediately made friends with some new folks I'd not met before because of my Doctor Who shirt. :) After waiting around for a while and dicussing our personal favorite Doctors and episodes, we boarded a really snazzy coach bus and began the 10-or-so hour drive from Shinjuku Station to Hiroshima.
I slept most of the trip, amazingly, despite the frequent stops we made for bathroom breaks and snacks. When we got to Hiroshima, we piled off the bus and onto a train, which took us right to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome (where the Memorial Peace Park is located). We headed to the museum first, checking our luggage in lockers and freshening up in the bathrooms there before getting our audio guides and heading into the museum proper.
Let it be said at this point that the exhibits in the musuem are not something I want to relive, ever. There were clinically-described dioramas of red spheres hanging over the city to denote where the bomb was dropped, and there were also life-size dioramas of children suffering from horrific radiation burns. The purpose of this museum is to convince people that they should never use atomic bombs for any reason ever again, and let me tell you I was convinced. It was eye-opening and horrible.
(Interesting clinical-sounding historical side note: American children are taught that the bomb was used to force Japan to surrender as an actual invasion of the archipelago would have cost up to 1 million American lives; Japanese children are taught that America dropped the bomb to intimidate Russia.)
After making it out of the museum, and feeling like I was never going to smile again, we split into small groups to tour the actual Peace Park with a bilingual tour guide. We saw a memorial for Korean forced-laborers who were victims of the bomb, as well as the Children's memorial with thousands of origami cranes symbolizing a wish for peace, and the Students' memorial which had a list of all the local schools from whom students had been taken for war-effort work. The huge skeletal building that you can see in the pictures is the former Hiroshima Prefectural Hall. Finally we went to the plaque they've erected at the hypocenter of the blast; it's a little tiny 3'x3' or so stand that just says 'the bomb went off here at this time', wedged between a parking garage and a hospital. I think it was sort of cool in a way, like "Once a terrible thing happened here, and now we've moved on and become better people for it."
We went out for lunch (I had okonomiyaki! :D) and after that we met up with the group again to take the ferry out to Miyajima, where we'd be spending the night.
~to be continued~
Please be warned before looking that the Hiroshima Peace Museum is filled with displays and artifacts that unflinchingly show the results of an atomic blast on human beings, and that many are upsetting and/or graphic and/or triggery.
So our Watern Japan trip. It was epic, and fun, and exhausting, and a little ridiculous. We started out running five minutes late, getting separated from the group, and thinking we were going to be left behind in Tokyo forever. >.>
Once we met up with our group, I immediately made friends with some new folks I'd not met before because of my Doctor Who shirt. :) After waiting around for a while and dicussing our personal favorite Doctors and episodes, we boarded a really snazzy coach bus and began the 10-or-so hour drive from Shinjuku Station to Hiroshima.
I slept most of the trip, amazingly, despite the frequent stops we made for bathroom breaks and snacks. When we got to Hiroshima, we piled off the bus and onto a train, which took us right to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome (where the Memorial Peace Park is located). We headed to the museum first, checking our luggage in lockers and freshening up in the bathrooms there before getting our audio guides and heading into the museum proper.
Let it be said at this point that the exhibits in the musuem are not something I want to relive, ever. There were clinically-described dioramas of red spheres hanging over the city to denote where the bomb was dropped, and there were also life-size dioramas of children suffering from horrific radiation burns. The purpose of this museum is to convince people that they should never use atomic bombs for any reason ever again, and let me tell you I was convinced. It was eye-opening and horrible.
(Interesting clinical-sounding historical side note: American children are taught that the bomb was used to force Japan to surrender as an actual invasion of the archipelago would have cost up to 1 million American lives; Japanese children are taught that America dropped the bomb to intimidate Russia.)
After making it out of the museum, and feeling like I was never going to smile again, we split into small groups to tour the actual Peace Park with a bilingual tour guide. We saw a memorial for Korean forced-laborers who were victims of the bomb, as well as the Children's memorial with thousands of origami cranes symbolizing a wish for peace, and the Students' memorial which had a list of all the local schools from whom students had been taken for war-effort work. The huge skeletal building that you can see in the pictures is the former Hiroshima Prefectural Hall. Finally we went to the plaque they've erected at the hypocenter of the blast; it's a little tiny 3'x3' or so stand that just says 'the bomb went off here at this time', wedged between a parking garage and a hospital. I think it was sort of cool in a way, like "Once a terrible thing happened here, and now we've moved on and become better people for it."
We went out for lunch (I had okonomiyaki! :D) and after that we met up with the group again to take the ferry out to Miyajima, where we'd be spending the night.
~to be continued~
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