Last days in Kyoto - Fushimi Inari

Another update from Japan :D I've had a lot of time right now so I'm posting two days in a row! Today its been terribly raining all day, so it was hard to motivate myself to get out of the hostel. I went and checked out the downtown, but I'm still a bit tired and theres the terrible rain and yeah, I didn't feel like wandering around in the rain for long. But I know the city is beautiful when the sun comes out! So... I'm waiting! :D

And tomorrow I finally move into my dorm! Once I finally have a place to live and am all set up I'll feel a lot more comfortable roaming around the city :D

So, since there isn't a whole lot of interesting stuff to report from today (seeing as my trip to downtown consisted of withdrawing money for moving in tomorrow, getting passport pictures taken for my foreigner registration card [in Japan you just go to a photobooth, except its a passport photobooth! Its amazing! Literally takes one minute!!!], went and talked to someone at the cellphone store [thinking about getting an I-phone since they have ridiculous deals on them right now... but not sure!], and then ate an amazingly amazinly tasty waffle... seriously,, best waffle of my life) so I'm going to talk about what I did on my last day in Kyoto!

[UPDATE: Since I started writing this blog, 2 other Kobe University Study Abroad students have come to the hostel I am staying in. There was already one here, so that means there is a total of FOUR Kobe University Study Abroad students staying here. And EVEN MORE COINCIDENTAL is that the one who JUST MOVED INTO MY ROOM is the other UW student also going to Kobe. This is just weird. Hahahaha the other Kobe students were smart and showed up TODAY and not two weeks ago like me :P Although I think I have an advantage over them now ;D Maybe? Not that it matters!]

Seeing as I had been in Kyoto for 5 days and the only sightseeing I had participated in was going to KitanoTenmangu Shrine, I figured I better see at least ONE more famous sight. And thinking back to my previous trip to Kyoto, and what was easy to access from my hostel, I decided to go to... Fushimi Inari!

Fushimi Inari is a good example of why Kyoto is a crazy place. From the main station of Kyoto, it takes at most 20 minutes and less than 2 dollars to access, without entrance fees, one of the most beautiful and mysterious places in Japan. Well, at least from what I've seen I give it that designation! :D But seriously, Fushimi Inari is an entire mountain covered in shrine. Its not just like a shrine on top of a mountain, it is an entire mountain covered in shrines. You could spend all day walking all over the mountain, wandering through the forest and exploring all the little shrines. You've all seen pictures of it, its famous for the massive numbers of orange torii gates, which end up forming tunnels there are so many of them stuck together.

That gate way up there (its quite a hike to the top I must say) is a torii gate. There are so many of them that:

It looks like this in places. (Both of these pictures are from when I went last year and therefore look sunny and bright, also surprising how much of a difference there is between pictures from the digital megazoom camera I used last year and the DSLR I use now)

Fushimi Inari is the head shrine of Inari, who is the Shinto god of business, so businesses donate these gates to the shrine, and as a result each one has a businesses name on it (you can't see it in the picture because they are written on the other side).

Unlike last year, when we went on a nice sunny day, this time I went in the RAIN! Yeah!! My last day in Kyoto was raining and looked like a Seattle day (seems like this whole week is Seattle days) but I decided to go anyway, seeing as it was my last day. And, in the end, going in the rain was actually good! I did get pretty wet and all, but the whole place got a totally different feeling in the rain. It wasn't just a crazy shrine mountain covered in twisting paths of shrines and torii gates, it was now a dark, wet, and scary shrine mountain!

I especially got that feeling at the top, where there were several people going to each shrine and praying,,, and,,,, I dont know if it was just their singsong voices or the specific sutras of Fushimi Inari or just that it was a scary rainy day, but it seemed pretty creepy wandering around a place that looks like this:


With the sound of chanting floating through the air. (Remember you can click on the pictures to make them bigger :D , Fushimi Inari is a pretty detailed place ;D)

But either way, it turned out great! Had a good hike, got some good pictures (although I mainly used my film camera so those won't show up for a while!), and got to see the amazing Fushimi Inari for a second time! Once I reached the top it even got sunny for me for a while :D

Wandering around this place though, I realized that ancient Japanese culture is about just as incomprehensible to me as like... going to an Egyptian shrine. Even with what I know about Japan, I have no idea what is written anywhere on the ancient shrines. I have no idea exactly why there are so many little shrines all over the place, or what the piles of mini torii gates are doing everywhere. But, it certainly feels comfortable and wellknown to me as a part of Japan, even though I don't understand it!

Oh and another great thing about Fushimi Inari is that it isn't crawling in tourists. Of course there weren't a lot when I went in the rain, but even when I went last year on a nice day it was pretty empty, especially at the top, the best part. The lower shrines are full of people, but it seems most people, especially foreign tourists, don't bother to climb to the top, instead you just see a lot of old Japanese people. So its a good quiet place to go :)

Picture time!

1300 years of shrine build-up results in this. Its like urban crowding, or being in a shrine grocery store or something.

And then there are areas like this, with wide paths and well separated shrines. Kind of like the upper-class shrine suburbs or something.

One unfortunate part of Fushimi Inari is that places to sit are sadly few. Especially in the rain xD unless you want to go to one of the awesome little mountain top restaurants. I cannot for the life of me figure out how you get store stocks to the top of a shrine-mountain, but they somehow do it .

Oh and another note, that orange is REAL. In the rain camera sensors interpret it really strongly, so I actually turned DOWN the saturation to the realistic level you see here. Its definitely quite the contrast between hundreds of years old stone shrines covered in moss and brightly colored torii gates (which are obviously not hundreds of years old with that color!)

Oh and also in my last few days in Kyoto, I went to a Japanese bar! My nunim Heson works part time at a Japanese bar, called an Izakaya, so I stopped there after her work! This place was super classy though, nothing like the traditional more bar-like izakayas, but it was quite fun! Extremely expensive, but fun! And tasty! And I drank my first alcoholic beverage since I turned 20 (legal drinking age here), omgosh! And while a macha cocktail was certainly tasty... I still think I'll skip on expensive alcohol from now on!!! Apparently usually going to an izakaya with a group of friends costs at minimum 3000 yen (about 33 dollars) per person,,, just for drinks and then you buy food on top of that... soooo yeah, I'm lucky it wasn't that kind of izakaya ;D And they had good food! I had jellyfish salad, a kind of fried potato thing, wasabi chicken (loving wasabi more and more every day :D) chicken... stomach? yeah stomach, and various other things, too many to remember oh no!

Before that I had made gyoza with Mizuho at her apartment though (speaking of which, making gyoza is a very fun and rewarding experience! :D.. not to mention tasty!) so I was really full! Izakaya and making gyoza in the same evening is tough! Lucky I could handle it. Mom and dad, don't you worry, I am eating well :D

And also the day after that (which was the day I went to Fushimi Inari, so going to the izakaya was the day before Fushimi) we had a mini drinking party at Mizuho's! Hahahaha the only reason I'm specifically talking about this is because, if you didn't know already, I never drink, and pretty much hate the flavor of all alcohol, so going to the izakaya and drinking at my friends house were new experiences! But, seeing as I don't like the flavor of alcohol, we brought out the heavy stuff,... Kahlua!! Hahaha.... I certainly like the flavor of that stuff, but I don't quite like the idea of a sweet coffee-like drink that will get you drunk if you drink too much of it.... hmmmm somehow that just seems kind of silly to me!! Seeing as I like my sweet drinks!
Oh but also we bought cream puffs (cream puffs in Japan are a really popular pastry, and soooo tasty), and also Mizuho had found some strange food earlier in the day and had me try it: chocolate korokke (korokke is usually like a fried patty of mashedish potato, but this was a fried patty of... chocolate :O ) along with yakisoba korokke (korokke filled with fried noodles!) and a chikuwa shuumai! (chikuwa is like a fishcake usually in kind of a tube shape, soooo good especially with cheese inserted into it, and shuumai is a chinese dumpling).

Anyway sorry too much food talk !! I'm going to actually go eat dinner now, rice with Wasabi Furikake! (Rice seasoning stuff :D ) Followed up by purin! (Japanese pudding, which is totally different than American pudding strangely, very good stuff :D).

Thanks for reading :D

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!