Pictures (part two): Tetsugaku no Michi and Osaka

More pictures! Yay! The pictures in this post correspond to this post. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in June. Are you feeling なつかしい yet? I am. I totally am.

You're now on Tetsugaku no Michi (the philosophers' path)! You have been warned.

This is what the philosophers' path actually looks like. Lots of shade, which is nice, because it was hot.

This will only make sense to one person. To that person:

I have fulfilled my duty.

My classmates attempting to be cute Japanese girls and failing pretty spectacularly.

Can you spot the gaijin? I mean, besides writing her wish in English, she wanted completely different things than everyone else.

The gardens at Ginkakuji. Be happy I'm not subjecting you to the 50 million pictures I took of them.

(SEE? MOSS. RIGHT THERE. Coolest garden ever, yes/yes?)

I just thought this was a pretty awesome staircase, even though we couldn't go up it.

Aerial shot!

Wait a minute, you mean there's buildings here too? Maybe we should take pictures of them.

....nah.

(I actually did take pictures of the buildings. But they're kind of boring.)

Trees! Lots of trees!

Okay, onto Hon'en'in.

Needless to say, the upkeep wasn't terribly stellar.

But this was a cool moat/canal thing.

Rock gardening!

Kind of twisty tree thing?

Seriously, not a whole lot there to look at.

This was a shrine we walked past but I couldn't go in because we had a Schedule to Follow. PFT.

Buildings! Buildings at Eikanji! (Also my classmate looking perplexed.)

Have I mentioned how much I love heights? I love heights so much. I think I posted exactly the same picture from Hu-san, but HERE, LOOK AT IT AGAIN.

Pretty gardens! Again!

The aqueduct at Nanzenji.

The outside of Nanzenji.

Purification by incense. It makes me cough. I avoid it, whenever possible.

Here we go, my ONE picture of Osaka! My, that was exciting.

I guess Nara is next. My more exciting (read: tiny shrine) pictures come near the end of the trip, so....sorry about that.

Pictures (part one): Shimogamo Shrine, my neighborhood, and my host family

Hello, people.

So I finally managed to get the pictures from my camera onto my computer. It only took FOREVER. (There is a long and exciting story concerning My Quest to Find a Computer Which Can Actually Talk to My Camera, but I will spare you.) So now I'm going to be posting some random pictures of things from my trip. WHOO.

I'm going to be doing a bunch of short-er-ish posts, because you really don't want to look at a couple hundred pictures all at once. Really. Also, I'm obviously not going to post ALL my pictures, 'cause a bunch of them are of Boring Things That No One But Me Would Find Remotely Interesting. This means that even though I took forty thousand pictures of tiny shrines, I will only show a few of them. And I will attempt not to fangirl over them too much.

Also, standard warning: I'm not a photographer, and it's a miracle that I can even get my camera to point in the general direction of the pictures I want to take, most days. Also, my camera is not the greatest. It does not understand the concept of focusing sometimes. So if my pictures cause those of you who have forty thousand times more camera skills than I do pain, um...sorry about that. I'll just grovel at your feet for forgiveness.

Also, it took me four tries to spell "forty" (and I just misspelled it twice more trying to type it there). Today is a bad day for English, apparently.

So, yeah.

So here, have part one of random pictures of things.

My host family! 3/4 of them anyway.

Best host family in the universe, yes/yes?

Me with my host family.

Yes, that is a picture of Moomin on the wall.

The last 1/4 of my host family (and Michael Jackson). He (my host brother, not Michael Jackson) was unconscious on the kitchen floor while we took the first picture (ASLEEP, not knocked out, so don't give me that look), so this was the next day.

Also, my little host brother and host father put that poster of Michael Jackson up when my host mom wasn't looking. She wasn't too thrilled with having it right in the middle of the living room, but it was too late.

A random street in the area of my host family's house.

The "shop village" (literal translation of the word), which was actually a street that was right next to my host family's house.

Also, the back of my little host brother's head.

The Kamogawa (the river right by my host family's house)! You have no idea how much I love this river. This was when it was pretty low, 'cause I took this picture my first day there, before the rainy season started.

Okay, now for some random pictures of Shimogamo Shrine. This was the shrine closest to my host family's house, and the place where the boy scouts went every other Sunday.

The first of the many (many) torii leading to the shrine. There was actually quite a long street between this torii and the next one (which led onto the actual shrine grounds).

Sacred tree!

Then there was a loooooong walk from here (right inside the second torii) to the actual shrine. The way was dotted with smaller shrines as well.

Here's one of the smaller shrines along the way.

And here's an even smaller one!

A sacred rock, which apparently sang the national anthem. OH YEAH.

The front gate to the main shrine. Right through the gate you can see the stage which important ceremonies are performed on, and beyond that is the actual honden.

This was a little tiny basin for purification right inside the shrine.

The pieces of paper tied to the tree are actual fortune telling papers. Depending on where you go, you tie good/bad fortunes to nearby trees so that they will/won't come true.

Okay, I just thought this was amusing.

The rope with the hanging bits of paper denotes a sacred place/object. (You'll always see those hanging around shrines, usually from the torii when you first enter.)

[/amusement]

Don't worry; I'm alive

I got home safely yesterday, but I was so jet-lagged and being smothered with my little brother's hugs that I didn't feel like writing anything even slightly coherent. So sorry about that. (Well, plus I kept switching back into Japanese accidentally, and on a blog that would have been pretty bad.)

Nothing particularly exciting happened on the way home, other than my watching all of Toy Story 2 on the plane (in Japanese) to keep myself amused. Oh, and reading more Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. And writing long emails. And pretending to sleep while the guy next to me invaded my personal space. And then I got home and gave omiyage to everyone in my family, so yay for that. And then I made my mum and my dad and my not-so-small brother watch the first episode of Durarara!! (which, by the way, all of you can watch online free (and legally!) here). Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. (The first episode made so much more sense the second time around, and now that I've been to Ikebukuro and KNOW what the heck they're talking about. Sunshine 60! I...didn't go there! But I know what it is now!)

Anyway, here's the last batch of pictures-that-are-not-my-pictures. I mentioned this a million years ago (back in June), but my camera doesn't connect to my computer, so the pictures I've been posting on here were not taken by me. They were taken by my classmate, Hu-san, who kindly agreed to let me post them.

(That's Hu-san in front. I'm just behind her making weird faces, like I always do.)

In any case, I think I'll get MY pictures sometime soon. Probably in the next few days. So you'll be spammed by lots of pictures of tiny shrines then.

Until then....here's some Yokohama-Kamakura-Tokyo trip.

Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunch.

I am 99.9% sure that the orange stuff sitting in the middle of the blue flower is uni (sea urchin). I had it at my host dad's restaurant, and it was SO GOOD, so I thought that it had to be something else, because I'd always heard that it was gagtastic. Then I had it at the restaurant in Kamakura and...I had trouble swallowing it, that's how gross it was. (I ate it anyway.) Conclusion? My host dad is a cooking wizard. Obviously.

Guide: Let me teach you something. You have to purify yourself when you visit a shrine or temple. Here, let me teach you the correct way to do it in an incredibly slow and condescending fashion.

Me: [attempts to look politely interested]

Pictures of the giant Buddha at Kamakura!

Guide: This is a shrine gate. You know what a shrine gate is, right? Do you know the difference between a temple and a shrine?

Me: [attempts to prevent herself from bashing her brains out against the guardian lion statues]

Here, have a shrine. It was actually a pretty cool shrine with an awesome story behind it. At least, I think it was awesome. I think it would bore other people to death. (If you are interested in aforementioned story, let me know and I will geek out at you. It has to do with the Genji and the Heike and BABIES.)

After this point, the photos get kind of random, so sorry about that.

Me looking worried while leaving a taxi!

Chinatown in Yokohama!

Maid cafe! (No, I didn't go.)

Pictures from our final party!

All the girls!

All the boys! (This is what they look like ALL THE TIME. Except sometimes I-san (all the way on the right) is singing enka* and B-san (all the way on the left) is pretending to be a Japanese girl.)

The men and our senseis (the last three people on the right). I only had two of them as senseis (the guy and the woman all the way on the right).

Giving omiyage to the teachers! (We all pooled money and bought gifts for them in Tokyo.)

When it came time for the teachers to leave, they bowed, and we bowed, and then all of them exited. All of them but our awesome male teacher (who apparently really likes gunpla**).

Teacher: [bows]

Students: [bow]

Teacher: [bows deeper]

Students: [bow deeper]

Teacher: [bows even deeper]

Students: [bow even deeper]

Teacher: [is reaching startling low bowing levels]

Students: [bow even deeper than he is bowing]

So then my host mom and little host brother came to visit.

Host mom: Handshake.

Little host brother: [quails]

HM: Come on, that's how you say "goodbye" in America.

Me: ....?

LHB: [sets jaw]

[HANDSHAKE OF +14 EPICNESS]

Whoo, everyone's gone! Time to be weird!

Time for random shows of strength!

This can only be solved one way: arm wrestling!

OH, THE PAIN! THE PAIN!

(Except I think I-san won the next round.)

Duel to the death...round two!

Well, that went...well...

So then all fifteen of us (fourteen program participants plus the residential director) crammed into the same elevator, just 'cause we could.

Our residential director shows her true colors!

(And she wasn't even voted Person in the Program Most Likely to Be the Antichrist. It was someone else.)

Guys, we need to do this more often!

*Enka = traditional Japanese style of music. Imagine country. Just in Japanese. And with less of a tune. Same general subject material though.

**Gunpla = a mishmash of "Gundam" and "plastic." They're robots...you can assemble. I bought two (Gurren Lagann and King Kittan). My bro and I will be putting them together. WHOO. I am a geek.

@Opal: No, the Atomic Dome isn't radioactive any more. The radioactivity in Hiroshima reached safe levels decades ago. (I think the exhibit at the museum said that it took a couple of months.)