Good Days in Kyoto part 2

Kitano Tenmangu Shrine in Kyoto, went there with Mizuho and Junko because there was a giant food festival :D (Oh and also, a note. If you click on the pictures they get bigger, just in case you want to see them in more detail :D Keep forgetting to mention this!)

This kind of stuff. Kind of like the fairs we have in the US I guess. Except, in my 1.5 months I have spent in Japan in my entire life, I have gone to and seen infinitely more of these than fairs. They do these things usually on a monthly or so basis. And all of the food there is amazing and cheap, and often rare and hard to find in other places! Soooo fun :D

I'm a bit far behind on my blogging here because its been so busy in Kyoto, but I already had written up a post on my personal blog so I'm going to post it here too, let everyone see the true blogging of Andrew. I'm going to touch it up a bit, but even sooo.... I wrote this at 1 in the morning after a crazy long and tiring day ;D

(Posted September 27th)
Ahhhhhh happy happy happy :D :D :D :D :D

If I really think about it, I still feel like why the heck am I in Japan right now, why didn't I wait until like next week, but the last few days have been so damn excellent I can't complain at ALL :D
Oosaka was certainly fun I suppose, but since I have come to Kyoto it has just been nonstop good experiences >W<

But omgosh Kyoto. The key points here are my friends Heson (my nunim, a Korean super respectful term for "older sister" that I use as kind of a joke since we're almost the same age :P), Mizuho, and Junko, seeing as they are my three really close friends I've been seeing in Kyoto :D But omgosh!

I think I already covered on the blog my first day and a half in Kyoto, the first day consisting of wandering around alone trying to find my hostel, then talking to a random old guy at an okonimiyaki restaurant. The next day was severe confusion due to not having a cellphone, but finally managing to meet my nunim, and then having a great dinner of kushikatsu with Mizuho.

But things have gotten even better! Yesterday I met with Mizuho and Junko, and omgosh. Meeting with Mizuho before everything was smooth and I managed to get along fine in Japanese, but I was still wondering, ohhhh what about Junko (although I had no reason at all to think she wouldn't want to speak Japanese or anything haha) but everything was perfect :D Hahaha we all get along just as well in Japanese as in English, and its so refreshing to see that Mizuho and Junko don't change at all whether they are speaking English or Japnaese! I also really felt like I was starting to get the hang of things at that point because we were joking a lot and I managed to express a lot of surprisingly deep things!!! Whats funny though is that I can express myself better than I can understand other people xDDD.... although I wonder if that is just a general personality issue, I like talking... (post writing note, I'm getting better at the understanding other people part, must listen soooooo closely) Dx I manage to express myself with my relatively super limited vocabulary, but that means when people pull out the big guns I have no idea what they are saying! But I'm getting so much better at just understanding the idea of things even when I don't exactly understand what is being said, which is both good and bad. But hopefully that half understanding will evolve into a complete understanding with time.

With Mizuho and Junko! We made nabe (Japanese hot pot stew type thing) at Mizuho's apartment~ Nabe is interesting because you don't just make a big pot of soup and its done, instead you make a broth, and everyone sticks what they want in there, you cook it, and then eat it, and then do it again hahaha. Oh and the soup was like miso flavor! Sooooo yummy, would be a really good food in the winter of course :D

But omgosh, today was like the icing on the cake. I've only been here for like a week and half so saying 'OMGOSH JAPANESE CLIMAX" is so stupid, but today was omgosh. First off, today I volunteered! My nunim is involved with a group of people who accompany special needs kids on outings to fun places like the park or aquarium or whatever, and she invited me and some other friends, and while I was really worried about it, seeing as I already have a hard time understanding my close friends, being exposed to and working with a whole volunteer group and special needs children would be really difficult, or so I thought. But omgosh I had no reason to be scary. A good way to put it is, I felt so loved! I've felt like that every day since I came to Kyoto actually, but waaaa. When we walked into McDonalds to meet everyone, it was so funny because they all yelled "ANDORYUU" and then a childs voice comes around the corner "ANDORYU KITA???" and like omgosh, I was so surprised but at the same time like AWWW EVERYONE WANTED TO MEET ME. And then Ahhhh the volunteer people were soooo nice, really weird of course (compared to normal Japanese) but in an awesome awesome way. The leader, Meri, looked like a pirate. And oh my gosh his son, the one who yelled my name, is the cutest thing I have ever seen, GENTA . OMGOSH.. JAPANESE CHILDREN. SO CUTE. AND THIS ONE WAS LIKE OGMSHFSKD

FSDFSDFSD I WANT ONE??? Its really funny because he was seven, but I am used to being around children Theo and Beckett's size so it seemed like he was much younger. However, it was really crushing to realize that a 7 year old's Japanese was so much better than mine, but maaaaaa still soooo fun. After meeting the volunteers we met up with the kids and paired up. My partner was Tsukasa (whoahhhh so weird written in English!!) and he was really worried at first to be paired up with the strange tall foreigner but he quickly warmed up to me :D
We all went out to eat and then went to the park and rode trains together and it was all good stuff. But the main point of the day was, I felt soooo much like I belonged. Of course I was getting special treatment x2 as a new member of the group, and as a foreigner, but omgosh. Everyone treated me like I was one of the group, and especially the special needs kids don't react to me as much as a foreigner but just like everyone else. The members of the volunteer group, at first I was worried that as a foreigner I might be a liability being at a low level in Japanese and all, but I didn't feel like that at all.

Omgosh and Genta said the most wonderful thing to me. What he said was basically "If I look at you I think you are an American, but if I talk to you you seem like a Japanese person!" This was before I (think I) disappointed him with my amazing non-understanding of grade school riddles, but it was just like AWW THANK YOU GENTA YOU MADE MY DAY OMGOD.

Meri and Genta, crazy awesome father and son

After that we were alll suppppper tired and dying from all the walking and chasing kids and stuff and oh yeah I WOKE UP AT 7 WITHOUT AN ALARM CLOCK (cuz I don't have one) AND I JUST WOKE UP FROM SHEER WILL POWER IT WAS AMAZING! so I was super tired, but anyway afterward we met up with more volunteer camp people, Takuya senpai and actually Yuuta came to the volunteer event and also Yea Seul, and we all had an awesome dinner of okonomiyaki and wandered around Oosaka and went to one of those awesome city parks that is like a hill and when you stand on the top at night you can see the city all around you but there are crickets and some crazy old people playing the ocarina or something so it sounds super awesome and its all suzushii (aaa,,, suzushii... means... forgetting English... cool and breezy)

But it got better! Heson nunim lives in Kyoto, so we came back together but we were super tired so she was worried about riding her bike 45 minutes home so we thought we better go get some donuts at misado (mister donuts) to wake up (which coincidently heson loves so much that she has tried every single one of their flavors haha), and we ended up waking up more and sitting on the beautiful awesome stairs of Kyoto Station and eating donuts (that stairwell, OMGOSH you must see the giant stairwell thingy of Kyoto Eki!!! I have tried to take a picture, but I am not equipped for architecture pictures!!) but anyway, I'm sure a lot of it has to do with that I'm so used to talking to Heson, but I basically managed to do an entire conversation mostly completely fluently. As in totally fluid! Of course there were times where I was like "I don't know this word, whats this thing?" and I was of course just being fluent in my I-have-the-vocabulary-of-a-4-year-old level Japanese, but still, it was like yabai (damn!). Since I came to Kyoto 4 days ago my Japanese level has skyrocketed. I suppose my actual knowledge of vocab has not changed a lot, but I have gotten infinitely more fluent, and we were even talking about like deeeeep things that would be tough enough in English and I was just like WOWOWWW I'M DOING IT, I'M LIVING THE DREAM :D

(it also just feeeels sooooooooo good to speak in that natural manner when random Japanese people are around, and you know they totally are like "I bet that dude can't speak Japanese and they are speaking English" and then BAM we're all laughing about donatsu (donuts) or something)

Anyway, that ends my crazy post. Follow up with my last days of Kyoto later :)

Now I am in Kobe, staying at a cozy little hostel. Today I was just wiped out from all the fun in Kyoto, so after the train ride here, I have just been chilling out all day, did some shopping at the supermarket (Japanese supermarkets are going to be tough to get used to... must learn how to read nutritional labels in Japanese!) today I ate rice with kimchi, some store made chicken skewers (I didn't know what the different types were, but I should have thought about it a bit more because one skewer was just chicken skin with sauce and another was chicken.... something.... I didn't like those ones. Anyway, lots to think about at the store!

Tomorrow I explore Kobe a bit and the day after tomorrow I will finally move into my dorm! Cannot wait to have my own room and space 0___0;;;

And one more photo for good measure :D

This was at the Sumiyoshi Taisha that I went to in Oosaka, they had the doors open to a really awesome looking shrine building,this is looking in through the doors and you can see light shining in further back in the room. Really wanted to enter, but sadly I had no idea if the sign on the door was telling me to take my shoes off before entering or that no one was allowed in. But no one else was entering so I didn't want to test my luck.

Thanks for reading!