steph's blog

Since I’ve obviously fallen behind terribly, here are a few photos from the last month or so :) I’ll even try to use my words a little bit this time, since the photos are fairly disjointed and a bit of explanation is required.

On September 27th I went to Fushimi Inari shrine on a field-trip with my religion class. This shrine is on a mountain – okay, maybe a hill – and actually rather than one big shrine there are various small shrines and things all over the mountain.


It also has a great many orange torii gates, which we walked through all over the mountain.

It was a hot day, and there was a lot of walking involved, so I was a bit uncomfortable. But it was a really nice place; I’d like to go back and have a look around some of the parts of the mountain that we didn’t see.

(We also had a nice view of Kyoto when we were partway up the mountain :) )

After the field trip ended I went into Kyoto to meet Laura, who had been on another trip.

I saw some more shrines and temples, but didn’t really have a good look at them. Went to Heian Jingu again, and the weather was slightly better than the last time, but still not a very pretty photo.

A couple of weeks ago I went into Osaka to see an exhibition about Ghibli movies. While I was waiting for the others at Temmabashi I went out of the station and found a park on the other side of the river, and sat there for a while since I’d been missing nature :)

The exhibition was interesting, but of course I couldn’t take any photos inside. It was all sketches and storyboards from various Ghibli movies.

Everyone who went was able to draw on one of these stickers and attach it to these large screens that were set up. I’m not sure if we were supposed to just draw the soot-ball, but it seemed like that’s what most people had done (maybe that’s just because it’s easiest?)

The next day I was meant to meet Etsuko, a girl who studied at Waikato last year, near Hirakata station so I could interview her for a report I had to write. However, she slept in and was 2 hours late… anyway, while I was waiting I heard drums and went to investigate what it could be. It turned out that some kind of festival parade was going past. I don’t know if it was an Aki-Matsuri (autumn festival) but that would be my guess.

We had coffee at Sora Cafe, a lovely place with a little garden around it. It wouldn’t have been out of place in NZ except for the fact that it was on the 6th floor! The food looked really good too, but of course by the time we finally went there I’d eaten already. I’ll have to go back one day for lunch.

The day after that was a public holiday, so no classes :) I went for a walk to explore Neyagawa-shi in a direction I hadn’t gone before. It turns out Japan does have graffiti (this is the first large ones I remember seeing here).

Also I found a mall that has clothing for young people, unlike the other places by the station, and even a shop with a plus-size section, yay! Yes, I have to shop there, at least if I want anything to fit my bottom half.

Oh, and Just Cuts was there too XD

Last Friday was a field-trip to Aki-Matsuri in Osaka’s Korea Town.



Definitely the most interesting Friday night thus far. Awesome traditional culture, awesome food (mmm, yakitori), awesome people :) Also found out that underage drinking does in fact happen in Japan (what do they expect, with beer in vending machines?) when a teenage girl who was so drunk her boyfriend had to hold her up fell all over me. And had some listening practice when a somewhat drunk old Japanese guy got all excited when he saw us 3 foreign girls sitting in the park, and decided he needed to talk to us XD

So that’s pretty much all the big things I’ve been up do. On a day to day basis it’s just class, homework, maybe watching TV… pretty much the same as at home (except that at home I’ve never seen an ad on TV for whale bacon D: ) I’m halfway through my Japan experience now, and it seems like I haven’t had time to see very much at all.

And you know what else being half-way through means? Mid-term exams D: I’ve got a conversation assessment (at 9 in the morning! cruel and unusual), an in-class essay, and a written exam for each of my Japanese classes. Plus a week or so after that there’s an exam for Religion class as well. Luckily at least there’s no exam for Pop Culture :)

On that note, time to go study for tomorrow’s kanji quiz. またね～！