Kyoto 紅葉 (fall colors)

People here in Kyoto make a huge deal about kouyou, aka "fall colors," but to be honest when I compare the kouyou here to New York and New England's, it honestly isn't as nice. The colors aren't as vibrant as those you'd see in NY, and they don't all come out at once. Instead, they change a little at a time so that the colors last forever (about 2 months or so), but they aren't as striking: I got some pictures from google images >:D

Kyoto's Fall Colors

North East US Fall Colors

Regardless, people here are all about the kouyou and Kyoto gets flooded with "leaf peeping" tourists every fall, supposedly. Earlier in the season my host parents were telling me that the weekend trains would be more crowded becasue of all the people coming into Kyoto to peep some kouyou at the temples.

I've also noticed that if just one tree has changed colors, about ten people at a time will notice it, stop what they're doing, and then gather around it to take pictures. Makes me think that we don't appreciate our fall colors in NY enough. Hahah.

Arashiyama and German Market

On Friday I was sooo tired but I went with my friend Chika to Arashiyama to see the light up. Friday was the 初日, the first day of the lightup. The whole event will continue for about ten days or so. Arashiyama is famous for having beautiful 紅葉, fall colors, and also for its pretty bamboo forest.

Some of the bamboo was lit with different colored lights, like blue :O

It was super-croweded, but still !

I made a small video. It was really dark out so I couldn't get much footage:

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The next night, Saturday, I went to ドイツマーケット, The German Market, with my friends. It was pretty small but neat because there was live music (Christmas songs!) and a huge tree and stalls selling German-y things like beer and hot wine and weiners, etc.

There was even a really drunk Santa Claus. He was standing near one of the wine shops and it looked like he was enjoying free refills.

and a carousel :D

Fall Break: Before and After

I just realized that I had forgotten to blog about some ultra-neat things that happened before break (!!) --

AKP gave us money to throw a Thanksgiving Party the Friday before break so that we could thank our host families for BEING SO AWESOME. So student council got together and planned the whole party, which took place in a large lecture hall on campus. We got there early to set up and shoved some tables together, hung some paper chains, and made Martin and Julia look Thanksgiving-festive :

Japanese Gothic (??)

Twins (!!)

Eventually our host families came and we started dinner. AKP bought us five or six Turkeys and the host families provided the rest of the food, since it was a potluck. It was a strange but tastey mix of Japanese food and American Thanksgiving foods.

After we finished eating, my song practica class went up to the front and we performed a stirring rendition of 'Popstar.' Youtube that song ! It was great and totally embarassing but for some reason I think the audience really loved us.

After the dinner party, I went bowling on Kawaramachi with Kate, Martin T, and Martin's neigbhor, Kohei. We played a couple of games normally and then got bored with that. Our next few games were all potty-shots and all left-handed. Kate and I teamed up and lost all the games against the boys except for the first one. What the guys don't know is that we were just letting them win.

The next day I went with Martin T to his hiking club meeting. We did a wimpy 10-minute run down by the Kamogawa and then went on a hike up 大文字, aka Daimonji. Daimonji is a mountain with a big 'dai' or 大 carved into its side. Every year there's a night when the city lights up the dai with fires. The image below is from google. Thanks google :

The day was nice and warm and it didn't take long to reach the top. When we were up there we were able to sit right in the middle of the 大. The parallel concrete lines in the picture below are the pits where the fires are lit. The kouyou (fall colors) were amazing :

The sunset was also pretty stellar:



The next night, Sunday, was 満月(mangetsu), aka a full moon.

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When we returned from break, Doshisha's Imadegawa campus (my campus) was in the middle of holding its annual school festival called 'Doshisha Eve.' The festival is three days long, but I went on the last day, Sunday.

I've never seen anything like this festival in the US. I wish our colleges had them. It was huge and there were so many people and performances. There were two stages set up where the music and dancing clubs, and individuals would perform. The hip-hop circle was amazing. There were also circle- and club-run food tents set up and indoors there were various kinds of themed cafes. There was even a cafe where all the guys dressed up like women. Since there was a HUGE line for that one, we didn't go, but I wish I had at least gotten a picture.

I went with Jessica and Faith and we bought food, watched the dancers and performances, saw a student-made movie in a classroom, and watched sweaty men wrestle with eachother in the outdoor wrestling ring.

Korea Wrap-up

On our last night in Korea, we got a surprise roommate at 5am. I didn't even hear him come in, but I became really wide-awake when he collapsed on the bunk below me. I was fine with it, once I realized that it was our new roommate, and not a hobo that wandered into our room... but then he started snoring and talking in Korean (?) really loudly in his sleep...



I eventually fell back asleep, but then Martin woke up to weird, smacking sounds. He thought that I was eating in bed, or that there was a horse in our room, or that I was eating in my bed with a horse, or something. Anyhow, it was our new roommate making drunken smacking sounds with his lips.


The next morning, the three of us got up at 8am to catch our plane back to Osaka. The whole time we were packing, our drunk roommate didn't wake up, but just flailed around in his sleep a lot. It was probably the best end our vacation could have had. bahaha.

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Once I got back to Kyoto, I dragged all the crap I bought in Korea back to my house and then slept a ton, but before that, I made this video --

Korea: Part 2

On Thursday, we chose to go to the Ice Gallery as our "cultural activity." Granted, an ice gallery isn't very cultural but it doesn't really matter because it's AWESOME.


The ice gallery was a room filled with tons of ice sculptures including ice people, ice animals, ice Eiffel Tower/ Statue of Liberty/ Korean palace, igloo, an ice house, ice slide,

AND ICE TOILET!

Because we were "foreign guests," the people who ran the ice gallery let us do ice carving for free. We were able to compete against each other and carve ice cups/mugs/chalices.

Following that, we went to Insadong, the cultural district. There they sell traditional Korean crafts and a lot of touristy things. About a billion Korean school girls stopped us to give us interviews about "appearances in our country," and we stopped to answer them all cuz we had nothing better to do. In all, it was neat to check out the shops and we also browsed around a cute shopping complex. It was a really artsy place :



Later on, we went checked out Korean malls. From what I've seen so far, malls in Korea are way different from malls in the US because the stores aren't separated by walls. Rather, the malls that I've seen in Asia are separated by displays and it looks really cute. I ended up finally buying a vest. I've been looking for one since I came to Japan. woohoo.

Being really hungry, WE FINALLY WENT TO A BEER TENT. We got really ripped off for food and drinks but anybody who goes to Korea has to try one (it was awesome), so it was totally worth it to go.


Today, Friday, was our last day here and we ran out of things we wanted to do for "cultural activity" so we basically decided to go to the place that sounded the coolest. Obviously we settled on "Dream Forest," and the three of us bused to the park.

This says something in Korean. Probably "Dream Forest," but I honestly don't know.

Real-ish looking model of Seoul they had at the Visitor Center.

SUGOI!

The park supposedly has all these attractions you can look at including a mirror pond and seven waterfalls-something-or-other. It turned out that a lot of the water attractions were all dried up for the winter. There was also a botanical garden somewhere but we didn't look at that because it was probably already dried-up and crusty. Although, even though it was winter, the park still looked pretty :

There was an observatory that was used in the Korean drama, Iris (no I've never heard of it either), at the edge of the park. We took a tram up to the top and got a good view of the city :



Tonight we went out shopping to use up the rest of our won, which is useless in Japan. We stopped once more at Uniqlo and Julia and Martin bought coats and I got another vest. We also bought "circles," which are this Korean deserts they sell on the streets. We have no idea what the name of them is so Julia and Martin just call them Circles. I dripped my circle all down the front of my new coat but then I cleaned it off, so now things are OK.

Shopping in Seoul is a lot different than shopping in Kyoto. For one, there are street hawkers and booths, bright lights, and they sell stuff late into the night. The shops in Kyoto, on the other hand, shut down around 8PM and then everybody goes home around midnight. I bought so many clothes.

For our last night in Seoul, the three of us went out for boneless chicken wings at place in Hongik near our hostel. Then, Julia and Martin went to go check out club night at Hongik and I met up with Ben and hung out.

SEOUL RAWKZ.

Korea: Part 1

It's Fall Break right now and so me and 3 of my friends came to Korea together. Mike, one of our friends, left for Seoul on Saturday and Julia, Martin and I followed on Monday. Before coming here, I spent the weekend in Kyoto going to the Toji flea market and seeing HARRY POTTER #7 (!!).

On Monday we traveled from Kyoto to Osaka by train and then took a plane to Seoul. It's a lot colder here in Korea so when we got here we were freezing. We met up with Mike who showed us the way to our Hostel: Seoulwise Guesthouse. The place is really nice. Here's a pic of us being roommies :


The first night we arrived, We went to Seoul Tower. I've only ever been to Kyoto Tower, and Seoul Tower was a lot better. We took a scary bus ride up the side of a mountain where the tower was built. You can see all of Seoul (the city is HUGE) from up there.


Tuesday, my friends and I met up with my friend Ben who's studying abroad in Korea for the semester. He agreed to show us around some parts of the city and it was also helpful that he knows some Korean. The first thing we did when we met up was go to a palace near City Hall. Ben says that once you see one Korean palace, you've seen them all :


After the palace, we looked around for a place to get food. For me it was SUPER SPICY but also it was cheap and delicious :


Because he had class, Ben left for school after lunch, and so the four of us AKPers took a hike up "Mystical Mountain." Obviously that's not the real name. Martin may have just made it up. Anyways, it was super mystical and slightly confusing. We didn't understand the directions about how to get there and so we ended up walking through this huge apartment complex and then up this hill. Eventually, we reached a Buddhist-like complex place that may or may not have been people's private residences (?). At one point we tried to walk into this gate towards a building when a dog started to bark at us so that we got freaked out and turned around.

After that, we kept climbing up and up. There were about 2934723749 stairs and they went on forever. Eventually the stairs ended at this rock that supposedly makes you pregnant if you pray to it. Here's a view of the rock from farther away. You can see Seoul Tower in the distance :

Eventually we reached this rock that we could climb up. There were tiny slits in the side of the rock face for us to climb but besides that there were no stairs or path or anything. There was a super-stellar view of Seoul from the top.

That night we met back up with Ben and three of his friends who are also studying abroad on his program. Everybody was really nice and we went shopping downtown. That's when we found out that North Korea had bombed South Korea. People weren't really making a big deal out of it though. Later on, the 8 of us went for dinner at a Korean BBQ place that was really inexpensive but yummy. You cook the meat by yourself on a grill set in the table :

That night I decided that we needed some roommate-friendship-bonding and so we stopped by the drug store on the way home and got face masks:

Becoming Beautiful

Wednesday was Mike's last full day in Korea because he planned to spend the rest of break in Tokyo. Every day we've been doing a cultural activity. Since Tuesday we went to a palace, we decided that for Wednesday's activity we would go to The Village, which has traditional Korean houses and games you can try.

When we got to the place where The Village was supposed to be, all we saw was a sort of park and a big hole and tunnels where Seoul buried a time capsule in 1994. We were a bit confused and couldn't find The Village, but we did find a cafe. The cafe had this thing where you could dress up in traditional outfits and drink tea and even though that sounds like the most super-lamest-touristy thing ever, we decided to do it:

BEST DECISION OF OUR LIVES. The whole dressing-up thing turned out to be amazingly fun and funny. We also looked great.

Eventually we ended up finding The Village (it was right next door to the cafe), but it was kind of lame and we didn't stay long. Dressing up was 324793847x awesomer.

Later that night we went shopping for omiyage (souvenirs) to bring back for our host families. We browsed around and I bought about a billion pairs of $1 socks and some scarves. There's a TON of street shopping in Seoul, and the funny thing is that all the booths sell the same thing. There's also a lot of really neat street food and these things called "Beer Tents," where you can go in and order food and drinks. The ice cream they sell on the street are about 10 inches tall :


Around 8:30PM, when we got tired of shopping, the four of us hit up this Western-style hair salon. Before then, nobody had gotten their hair cut for the three months we've been in Japan. It was a bit of a problem. We were lucky that the people at the salon knew a bit of English and they were really nice. They gave us Korean Hairstyles.

Korean Hairstyles: (For Girls) The salon people cut our hair dry and then spent 1/2 an hour styling it really nicely for us. (For Guys) The salon people cut their hair into faux-hawks, washed it, and then spend 1/2 an hour styling it. Dudes in Korea take really good care of their hair and always have it looking perfect. To be honest, it took the guys longer to get their hair cut than it took us.

Finally, on our way back to Hon-dae, the area where our hostel is, we passed by all these pretty lights and Christmas decorations. Korea's a really Christian place and so right now everything looks so festive. We decided to show off our new hair with celebratory pictures :



Once back in Hon-dae we celebrated Mike's last night in Korea at a bar. We ordered way too much food and shared it all. The platter that I chose was a bit spicy and had some seafood in it including squid. It also had something called "sundae" which--I found out later--is actually made of noodles and pig intestines and pig's blood. When I was eating it I had a feeling that it was something that would gross me out.

Eiga Mura, Yakiniku, Tako-Pa

Last Monday, one week ago, our 'Otherness in Japanese Cinema' class took a field trip to Toei Studio Park, aka Eiga Mura. I was really psyched to go because they have film sets from famous movies, including a set used in the currently released film, Ooku. When I was there I found out that the sets at the place are used in over 200 movies a year.

Another weird fact I found out before I went is that my host brother used to go to acting classes at Toei Studio Park. I guess he was in a drama or something. I really didn't understand everything Okaasan was telling me..

Anyways, here are some pictures from the park, and a video:

When we first got to the park, they were putting on a sword fighting show. After it was over, the actors asked for audience members to go up on stage and display their skills. Hannah and Rachael both volunteered to go up and pretend to slice guys open with katanas.

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This past Friday, a bunch of people from Joint Seminar (my class that combines Japanese and AKP students) went for nomi/tabe hodai (all you can eat/drink) at a yakiniku place on Shijo near Daimaru. I had never done yakiniku before but it was good to try it before I go to Korea, which is famous for having awesome yakiniku.

There was a brazier-type thing with a grill set in front of us to cook thin slices of meat on. One of the boys sitting at our table was Korean so we joked that he's a yakiniku expert, and we had him cook all the meat.




Yesterday, Sunday, DESA (an English-speaking club on campus) threw us AKP students a takoyaki party, aka 'tako-pa.' Takoyaki are octopus balls. But not really balls of an octopus, rather they're balls of dough with bits of octopus tenticals inside. You can also put other stuff in them too. At the party we filled them with things like cheese and chocolate. I ate too much.. probably at least 12 pieces + other snacks heh heh.




One week till Korea ! :D