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!