Jidai Matsuri

Sooo I know I'm a little late with this post, I'm sorry! Well, I never SAID I would post every week, but it was becoming a sort of a thing and... anyway, I've been pretty busy, but here are a few pictures at least, of the Jidai Matsuri last week (the festival to celebrate Kyoto, with a parade costumes from present day to very early Japan), and a couple from my trip to Gion with a friend.

The friend who took me to Gion also gave me this lovely bento! We had a picnic by the river ~

On the way back to the shopping district we stopped by a cafe. It was very busy out on the street, being a Sunday and the middle of the tourist district, but once you stepped inside the cafe it was very quiet except for gentle music box music from hidden speakers, and there was a little garden with a bamboo-type fence. Also, the tea was gorgeous.

Speaking of tea, I found a great little bakery called Pin de Bleu near my dorm, so I bought some buns to have with my morning tea last week.

They were as good as they look ~ If you find yourself in Kyoto, there are a couple of these bakeries around, here's the website: http://www.pin-de-bleu.jp/

I'll be posting again at the weekend, I'm going on a trip to Kobe! It will be my first time venturing out of Kyoto (well, I went to Osaka for that British fair, but the department store was in the station so I didn't actually SEE Osaka...). Anyway, I'm really looking forward to it!



 

Enryaku-ji

This week's been pretty busy, with our first end-of-chapter test (turned out to be not at all scary) and a pizza party on Friday. Then, yesterday, I went to Enryaku-ji, a huge temple complex on Mt Hiei, apparently one of the most significant places for Japanese Buddhism. I went with an organisation called TISA, which runs trips out to interesting places or to do fun traditional Japanese things, for Japanese students as well as international students. Apart from me, there were international students from China, Taiwan, Bangladesh and Kyrgyzstan, and more than 10 Japanese students. Everyone was really friendly, and very patient with me speaking Japanese.
They told us to wrap up warm, and on my way to the meeting spot I could totally see why, with this view up to the mountains in the north of Kyoto:

The train journey there took over an hour; Mt Hiei isn't actually too far from where we were, but the cable car on the Kyoto side of the mountain wasn't running because of the weather. We had to travel around to the other side for the mountain train, which I didn't actually mind because it meant I could talk to everyone, and we also got to travel on this train:

(I didn't hear, but when we got off some of my new friends were talking about how creepy the announcements on the train had been - apparently they were in Thomas' voice, high pitched and weird)
From this station it's about a ten minute walk up to the Sakamoto cable car.

I've been planning to hike up to the top of Mt Hiei with some friends, but seeing how steep the mountain is on the way up made me want to think about that a little more...

Here's the view from the station at the top down to Lake Biwa (still a little overcast, even in person you couldn't see when the lake stopped and the mountains began, and then what was mountain and what was cloud):

From there we started a quiz about Enryaku-ji - the tour leaders asked us questions related to each temple we visited. (Spoiler: my team lost miserably, but it was still really fun~). First we went to Konpon Chu-do, where there's a flame that's been burning for 1,200 years. I knew about the flame but I didn't realise that this was the building where it's kept, so I didn't really pay attention to it (oops!). The temple's garden was pretty, though, and there was a very friendly monk inside who was chatting away to everyone.
This is a pole that was outside; my friend didn't know what its significance was, but I thought it was pretty.

We also went to Dai Ko-do, which is full of portraits of various monks, tracing right back to the Buddha himself.

Then we caught a bus up to the next area of the mountain. It was much much colder up there, everyone broke out their scarves. First we walked up past two temples called Nanai-do, that are connected by a bridge.

Honestly, they felt a little abandoned, so I was surprised when our tour leader shushed everyone and you could hear monks chanting from inside. Apparently, though no one actually lives there, monks still go there to pray. Without any visible heating, it must be pretty cold...

From Ninai-do, you go down a flight of stone steps and you get to Shaka-do.

On the edges of the courtyard there were lots of the little Buddha statues with red aprons. I asked a friend what they meant and he said it's probably for purity - and also suggested it might be to stop them from getting cold. Did I mention it was cold? It was cold.

People took turns ringing the big bell that sits above Shaka-do, then it was sadly time to go home. My friend got a couple of fun pictures on the way, though:

 

So we saw a lot, but actually there are 150 temples that make up Enryaku-ji, including a whole other area that we didn't go up to, so I'll definitely go back sometime soon to explore some more!

One last picture - after we got back to Kyoto I went shopping with my new friend from Taiwan, who introduced me to this great little Green Tea Cafe. We both went for the green tea hot cake, with butter, honey, azuki beans and ice cream. It was gooooood ~

It's been very hot. That's it.

Well, I mean, I HAVE been doing various things (mostly university-related) but the big story this week really is that it's been 30 degrees for days and it's getting silly now. Luckily it's supposed to cool down starting today and become a little more autumnal! Don't get me wrong, it's been lovely having this extended summer, but it'll be nice to wear some of the cooler weather clothes I brought.

University's going ok - I have a similar workload to last year's Japanese classes, which is pretty nice, and the work itself isn't too hard, just enough to be challenging, which I prefer.

This weekend's been fun, anyway - I'd been planning to have a Friday night in but a friend passed by at 9 and told me she was off with a few people to karaoke, and I tagged along. I'm really glad I did, we sang until 1am and had a pretty great time ~ The only downside was getting up at 7.30 the next day to cycle to my ceramics class (it's all the way across the city and takes an hour). I'm certainly going to be much fitter by the end of this course!

The second ceramics class was worth the cycle - we were making the bases of the tea cup and bowl that we started last week, and putting the finishing touches on them before they're fired. This is my tea bowl, I'm really pleased with it - I can't wait to drink tea from it at the end of the course!

 

Next Saturday I'm going on a trip to Enryakuji on Mt Heiei: you get there by cable car! I'll try to take lots of pictures, it should be a really fun trip ~



Friday classroom

 

It's easy to accidentally daydream in my Friday class, with a view like this (those are lovely rolling hills in the distance)

Arashiyama

Arashiyama is a tourist spot really close to where I'm living, and today we had an event there with the SKP buddies. I'm not sure if Arashiyama is historically significant, though there are a lot of temples about. Mostly people seem to go there because it's pretty. Apparently if we go back in a month or so all of the leaves on the trees you can see on the mountain sides will have turned red; it's supposed to be beautiful. The area is a cycle ride away so it would be nice to cycle back in November ~

 Anyway, today the buddies took us exploring a little way. There was some kind of ceremony happening at one of the temples and it was really cool to be able to hear the monks chanting.

We also went through the bamboo forest. There has been a lot of damage from the typhoon that came a little while ago, it must have been pretty scary.

We also found this shrine along the path - one of my new friends told me that it's pretty rare to find a shrine with raw wooden torii like this, because normally they're painted red.

Then we went down to the bridge area. The water in the river is fresh out of the mountains and everyone was saying how nice it would be to go paddling ( it was super hot again today).

It was all very fun :)

Another fun thing was the ceramics class that started yesterday! It's right across town in an arty area, and to get to the classroom you have to walk through a cafe, past the actual ceramics studio, and up a really narrow staircase to the second floor. The building is just three small rooms stacked on top of each other! 

This is the view out:

We made a Japanese style tea cup and also the kind of tea bowl that you drink from in a tea ceremony: we're going to get to drink tea from them at the very end of the course! It was really interesting how the teacher showed us the same basic steps, but then when we made our own everyone ended up making things that looked completely different. Anyway, here's my half-finished tea cup:

I'm looking forward to the next class already!