A Long December

Once again, it's been a while - sorry everyone! Though to be honest, not much has been happening until the winter holidays these last few weeks.

 

I have one more week left of my second quarter here, so first some notes on classes and stuffs.

Japanese is... mixed. Although it's started to piece together better in my mind, I'm starting to find that not only are new things not going in, I'm also beginning to forget the things I already knew. So that's less helpful. I'm considering dropping it next semester, as I now know enough(ish) to get by, but I'm not too sure yet. It is cool being able to hold actual conversations now, and the class is still really nice. So we'll see.

Peoples and Religions is pretty much as easy as I anticipated. The lecturer is lovely, but in class he tends to just go over the chapter of the textbook we've been set to read for that week, so I find it quite hard to concentrate. Learning about Shintoism was pretty cool though, I want to know more!

Japanese Culture is... meh. I think what we'll be moving onto this month should be good (things about gender identity in Japan), but what we've done so far hasn't been particularly interesting. We did talk about a few films though - Memoirs of a Geisha and Tampopo - and that was a tad more fun. We have to do a group project for it, and I'm so glad ours is a written report rather than a presentation. It's a really boring topic, though, so I have no motivation to work on it at the moment. But hopefully I'll get round to it soon!

I managed to switch out of the East Asian Societies class, and instead I'm taking one called Globalisation and Law, but it's actually about utopian and dystopian societies in literature (I have no idea how the module title is related, but hey). It's really fun! The teacher's a nice Australian guy, and I think there are only about twelve of us in the class, which is cool. We've had to read some amazing books so far too - Gulliver's Travels, H.G. Wells, We by Zamyatin (which is amazing and everyone should read it!), and at the moment I'm reading Brave New World, and then some George Orwell. I'm really enjoying it!

  Apologies for the wall of text there, it's hard to put in pictures relating to classes. So yeah, for most of December I was pretty much just working. One fun thing I did was a flower arranging, or ikebana, class, which was really nice but I don't think I'm very good at it! It was intersting to see the philosophy behind it all, though. We also visited Beppu's infamous sex museum (??!!) but I won't include pictures of that. It was... an experience, though.

And then suddenly it was the holidays! It was good to have some time to relax. On December 23rd we saw a firework display in Beppu - it was incredible! Probably the best firework show I've ever seen. The the music was a tad questionable. It was a really lovely thing to do, though.

Christmas Day itself was a little bizarre, but nice! A small group of us made a meal together, and did Christmas crackers and other Christmassy things. It was a little surreal, but good to do something to stop us all from going too crazy! And after a few more days relaxing and doing nothing, Sarah, Dani and I went to Kyoto for New Year! It was so much fun ^^

Kyoto Tower, reflected in Kyoto station

 

 

 

Our room!

We left on the evening of the 30th, and got back on the ferry to Osaka, woooo! Again, we were in the weird sardine rooms, but I decided to actually attempt to sleep this time. It wasn't ideal, but I got a few hours kip. We arrived in Osaka in the morning, and from there we got the train to Kyoto - the journey took about an hour, and when we got there it was snowing! Unexpected, but very pretty. Our hotel was just round the corner from the hotel, so we left our bags and went to Kyoto Tower. Of course, we couldn't see much from the top because of the snow, but it was fun!


We headed back to our room and settled in, then in the evening met a few friends for food and a few drinks for New Year's Eve, then went to a Temple for just before midnight to join the locals! Again, it was very surreal, but pretty amazing. We did a countdown (and got some very strange looks), and rang a massive bell just after the stroke of midnight. It was a really lovely thing to do. But after that we were shattered, so we headed back and collapsed into bed - real beds, finally!

The next day, Sarah was feeling pretty ill so she decided to just stay at the hotel and recover. So Dani and I went out and explored - and ended up walking much further than we'd meant to, only realising when it came to walking home! But we found a fair few awesome temples along the way, and an amazing shrine where people hang these little fabric things that are meant to look like monkeys with their feet bound together, with wishes written on them. We also discovered a lovely little coffee shop run by the most adorable old Japanese couple, it was so sweet!



That evening we played Uno and just relaxed, and the next day we all figured out the bus system and visited some more temples. We actually ended up in the same area we'd been in the day before. My favourite temple of the day was Sanjusangendo Temple - not only were the grounds beautiful, inside the main hall are literally thousands of statues of deities. It's completely jaw-dropping. Unfortunately you can't take pictures, but look it up!



We also went to Kiyomizu Temple, which was busy but very pretty, and down from there is a fantastic street for buying souvenirs! So we spent a lot of time there, and I bought a (relatively cheap) kimono! ^^ I'm sure there'll be pictures of that at some point, it's lovely. We went back to our favourite little cafe, and I think that was about it for that day. On Monday (I think?) we went to the other side of Kyoto, and saw some amazing temples there - including the Grand Shrine to the god of alcohol:

And Daikakuji Temple, which was very beautiful: 

Among many others! We got the bus back again, and spend the evening playing yet more Uno in the yukatas (dressing gown type things) provided by the hotel. The day after we just relaxed (it had been pretty hectic so far, and it gave Sarah a chance to recover), so we just explored a little and did some shopping. In the evening we had an epic adventure to find Kyoto's Pizza Hut! It was a mission, way out in the backwaters of Kyoto, and took us forever to find. It was completely worth it for (almost) real pizza, though!

The day after, we did a fair few things - Kyoto Castle (which isn't very castle-like, but very pretty all the same), Ginkakuji Temple (which is meant to be the silver pavilion, but they never got as far as actually putting the silver on. The grounds are lovely all the same), and Kinkakuji (the gold pavilion), which is stunning!

 

The next day was our last day, so we checked out but left our bags at the hotel. Then we got the train down to Fushimi Inari Shrine, which is absolutely incredible - it's a long trail up the mountain, made up of hundreds/thousands of the red gates you see outside shrines (torii). It's amazing! Probably my favourite place of the things we'd managed to see. We managed to somehow get slightly lost and didn't get as far as the top, but it didn't really matter. We got some food, headed back to the hotel to pick up our stuff, then went on our way back to Osaka again.

The ferry ride was pretty uneventful, but when we made it back to Beppu (at about 6:45 in the morning, guh) we found out it had been snowing up at APU, so the buses weren't going up the mountain. So we had to wait in the freeeeezing cold for a taxi for probably about half an hour - not very pleasant! But a sweet Japanese girl called taxis for all of us, and we made it back eventually. Since then I've really not been doing much - avoiding work, mostly! But we start back in two days, so I'll hopefully have everything done by then.

Sorry for the massively long post today! And hope all is good with all of you. I'll leave you with another pretty leaf picture, taken at Daigakuji Temple. Take care!