A Little Catch-up...

Okay, let's back-track a little.  Here are some photos of Osaka en route to Kyoto.

Katie at the train station that will take us away from the Osaka ghetto to Kyoto

Elementary school kids (shougakusei) on a field trip, I imagine, in somebody's fields.  There were all kinds of fields intermittent in the cities

This is a pretty representative shot of what most of the towns looked like between Osaka and Kyoto

That lighter green stuff is bamboo (take).  Sensei said that this is what's call "take-aki", or the autumn of bamboo.  Now is when the bamboo changes colors.  Cool, huh?

The front of Kyoto Station.  It's a major landmark in Kyoto, because it connects withe pretty much the entirety of the public transit system

Kyoto Tower Hotel...I just thought it was cool

This is the entrance to the train station.  Those two Chinese symbols put together read "Kyoto," and mean "capital metropolis"

So after we finally got to our hotel, we got some much-needed sleep, and headed out the next morning to find some new luggage.  Katie's roller broke the second we landed, and we were trying to downsize, so we went walking pretty early.  Because of the time difference, I woke up around 5a, and was ready for the day by 7a.  Can't even remember the last time that happened.  We were walking around the area by 8a.  We were located near a zoo, and there was a little shopping-area in front of the zoo.  Most shops weren't open yet, and it was full of old Japanese people who kept staring at us.  It was starting to dawn on me that maybe this wasn't the best of neighborhoods for two young American women to be staying alone.  Clearly, these people weren't used to seeing tourists.

We got the luggage we needed, and headed back to finish downsizing, then checked out and got to the train station.  It was supposed to be a very simple matter of taking the train to Kyoto Station, then the subway to a particular stop, and Sensei told us via email that from there it would just be a very short walk to the ward building.  Right.  About how all our simple, fool-proof plans always work out.

First of all, we got to Kyoto Station around lunchtime--hours before we were going to meet everyone at the church.  So we decided to do something in the meantime.  But we were both feeling pretty bad, physically.  I was feeling sick.  I think it was a combination of moving suddenly to a humid climate and catching a cold.  Not to mention the traveling halfway around the world.  We both needed food and rest.  After a tense few minutes of trying to connect to the internet so we could get the info about where to meet and how to get there, we left the station for some fresh air and food.  We took a good hour to just sit and snack, during which time I saw a sign for a temple nearby.  Neither of us wanted to go far, but I was really tempted to see just how close this temple was.  We set out, and we found it pretty easily.  It's called Higashi Honganji.

Katie and I decided that this didn't sound like a good thing...

Lovely moat surrounding the temple

Me, looking and feeling totally proud of myself for being at a real Buddhist temple

I love the pine trees they use in these temple gardens

Here's the main building of the complex.  Unfortunately, there was some construction going on at the time

Triumphantly holding up the trash I couldn't let stay on the ground

That gold is beautiful against the black (I want to say lacquer...).  Everyone should also take note that this is photographic evidence that Airbenders still exist, and walk among us as Buddhists.

Katie took this shot intended to illustrated the steepness of the steps, but I think it's just a cool photo

Remember that gate I was posing so proudly under?  That was a side gate.  This is the main entrance.  Because of the construction, however, you had to enter in via a side gate

Haha, this is a middle schooler (chuugakusei) who hesitated because he wasn't sure if he was in the picture.

This poor child was traumatized by that pigeon, methinks...

 After exploring outside, we were able to go into the main building where the priests were going about what I can only assume is their usual business.  I'm not really sure what they were doing, but people were taking off their shoes, going in, and praying, so we did, too.  Minus the praying.  The inside was gorgeous!  The floor was covered totally in tatami, or bamboo floor mats.  There were columns, and in the back were the altars (not sure if that's the right word), and there were beautiful golden relief scenes lining the walls near the ceiling.  I would have posted photos, but no cameras were allowed inside.  It was so neat to be in there, and the whole diversion was incredibly refreshing, so we headed back to the station to catch the chikatetsu (literally, underground-below iron, aka the subway) to our stop.

We got off the subway and asked the guard where we needed to go.  He explained to us that it was a 30 minute walk from where we were.  I laughed in his face, turned to Katie, and said, "That's not happening."  We hailed a taxi and told him the exact address of the ward building.  Rather than input that address to the perfectly good GPS he had perched on his dashboard, the taxi driver immediately said, "Ah, zenzen wakanei yo"--a very casual, slightly slangy way of saying "I have no idea where that is."  Great.  So I tried to explain in clumsy Japanese the directions from Sensei's email.  "Wakanei yo."  Katie pulled the email up on her phone, risking fantastical roaming charges for it.  "Mada wakanei yo."  I was so close to hijacking the car myself when Katie got the much better idea of calling Sensei.  We listened intently as he explained to the driver how to get there.  I'm here to tell you, Sensei said pretty much what I did, only in prettier Japanese.  I was vaguely miffed, but mostly just glad we were finally going to be done.

The driver took off, and, after about five minutes, breathes, "Shimatta!"  "Shoot!"  He pulled over and stopped, and I looked out the window to see if I could see anything helpful.  I did.  I saw foreigners, or gaijin.  I was about to comment to Katie how rare that was when I realized something--I recognized those gaijin.  What the....?  At the same time, Katie and I began to say things like, "Stop!  Here's fine!  Those are our friends!"  They were other BYU students making a quick stop at the local convenience store.  He let us out, and they graciously aided us in getting to the church, carrying our heavier bags.  We were so exhausted, I thought I could have slept on the street right then.

We made it to the church, and once we were all gathered, we were treated to a dinner at a now-quintessentially Japanese restaurant--Kentucky Fried Chicken.  It was disgusting, totally greasy and whatnot, but they have a melon-flavored soda that was AMAZING.  We were all pretty giddy and nervous about meeting our host families soon, though, so we didn't complain.  Well, I did.  But I was tired, and that's what I do when I'm tired.  I complain incessantly.

At last, we had all assembled--BYU students and host families sat in the chapel, awaiting the final verdict of who would be with whom.  I was placed in the Matsunaga home, and Matsunaga-kyoudai took me home.  I was completely jet-lagged, and he understood that.  When I got home, Matsunaga-shimai drew me out a very careful and surprisingly accurate map to get to the correct bus stops that would get me to the church for school the next morning.  I almost died while watching her.  Not only was I sick and jet-lagged, but I was sitting on my ankles, Japanese style.  After about fifteen minutes of that, I couldn't feel my feet!  That hurt so bad, I had to take breaks to massage my calves.

Mercifully, I was dismissed for bed.  It was about 10:30p.  I was taken to my room earlier to drop off my things by the two youngest children, who quickly disappeared to bed.  My room obviously belongs to them, normally.  The 8-year old, Sakura-chan, has a congratulatory certificate for her baptism on the wall, and there's lots of chapter books and magazines on the bookshelf.  I walked in and immediately rejoiced: I would be sleeping on a futon.

Here's the futon after I laid it out

It's a small room, but cozy and clean

And there's a delightful little piece of home hanging on the wall :)

This is so Japanese.  They've got storage places hidden up the yin-yang here

I love being here with the Matsunagas.  I'm always worried, though.  I'm afraid I'm not doing my best to be a good guest.  But they seem to enjoy me, so I'll keep being as attentive as I can.

I talk a lot with Matsunaga-shimai.  Like I said before, she studied in Utah, so we usually use that to fall back on for topics.  Tonight, after I surprised her with a Mother's Day gift, she and I chatted about all kinds of things--Utah, weather, schooling.  The other day, my teacher told me my Japanese has improved, even after a few days.  At the time, I was reluctant to believe her.  But after today, I'm starting to.  After chatting with her for awhile, she started making dinner, and I headed upstairs to play with my new internet connection the Matsunaga-kyoudai showed me how to use.  Once I got there, I started chatting tentatively with the two youngest, Sakura-chan and Subaru-kun, both of whom got to say hi to my family when I was on Skype with them after church.  I think that helped to break the ice.  We started chatting about the toys they had, then they started shooting me with one of those nerf-disk guns (teppe).  In all my years of babysitting, I've found that nothing builds good rapport with children like letting them mercilessly gun you down while you stand defenseless.  So that's what I did.

The next thing you know, all five of us are playing Uno, and I'm fitting in easily with all of the kids.  They are way fun.  They taught me a new card game, too, which was interesting.  Between their Kansai-ben (dialect) and the fact that they don't really know how to dumb down their Japanese as effectively as their parents do, I came really close to not understanding the situation at all.  But we made it work, and we all had a good time.

Curry over rice for dinner, and a special Jell-O-like dessert afterwards.  I was having so much fun, but I remembered that I had homework left still.  So I excused myself, and came up here to blog.  Oops.  Actually, I did get my homework done, too.

But I digress.  After class the first day, we took a walk down the river to a shrine where there is a tiny archery hall, where we got lessons on Japanese archery.  It was so fun!  Archery here is a martial art, just like any other, but the style is so different from that of the West.  I would take up Japanese archery in a heartbeat.

 

Here's some picture of the river, and the wildlife there:

Baby nutria and their ugly Mama

Hawks that will apparently attack you if you look them in the eye

Lots of beautiful cranes, which are considered good luck in Japan, as they are a symbol of longevity

Neat bridge that spans two forks in the river.  This is the convergence, and that median marks the split

Isn't that just beautiful?

This is the gate of the shrine where they had the archery hall

 And now, at last, the long-promised photos of Fushimi Inari shrine.  A few notes--it's technically not called a shrine, but a "taisha", or complex.  And it's not exactly Shinto, but more animistic, in the words of Sensei.  It belongs to a particular religious minority, and is something of a fusion between Shinto and an ancient reverence for the fox.

So there's the torii that marks the entrance to the shrine, but there you can see the statue of the fox with the fire at the tip of it's tail.  Sensei said that in this area, the fox was sort of revered the way the coyote was by some Native American tribes

This place also happens to be the documented origin of the fortune cookie.  The phenomenon began in a Japanese-owned Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, and they were modeled after a type of cookie that's been made here for generations.  The cookies here are less sweet, of course, but same basic idea.  How cool is that?

We were stopped by a group of chuugakusei on a class trip, and they asked up some questions in English for one of their assignments.  They were adorable.  The lighter-skinned one on the far left was named Hirato-kun.  The darker-skinned one standing next to Katie got really embarrassed for asking Katie her age when she responded that she was 23.  He apologized profusely, and began to praise her looks to make up for it

Once you enter a shrine, you use these spigots to cleanse yourself--first your left hand, then your right, then using your left hand you bring some water to your mouth and rinse it out.  There is still some debate amongst us BYU students if you're supposed to swallow the water after that, or spit it back out...

Katie and me inside the path of 1000 torii

You can't see them when going forward, but the second you turn back to look, you can see the names of donors to the shrine carved into the torii.  It's super neat.

A fantastic photo accredited to Katie

 

Katie, Derek, and me

Katie and me, up where the kami lives

Then Saturday, Katie's host mom took us to Ginkakuji, where there are beautiful gardens.  Matsui-shimai, her mother, took this for us.

This is us in front of the pavilion

I just love these gardens

This flower Matsui-shimai called a sutsuji, and it blooms in white, lavender, purple, magenta, and this color, which she called apricot.  This one is my favorite

Just look at that.  These gardens are why I started learning Japanese

 

We got stopped by more chuugakusei.  I have never been so popular with middle school boys...

That's been the adventure so far.  More exciting trips planned this week!  Tune in again!