Barbecue

SORRY it's been ages since I updated this. Mostly that's because I haven't been up to anything particularly news-worthy (unless endless kanji tests count). Anyway, we had a barbecue by the river at the weekend so here are some pictures ~

I love that they haven't made stairs or anything here. In the UK I think sliding down this concrete slope to the river bank would be highly frowned upon, especially carrying BBQs and the like (the whole thing would probably just be fenced off) but here it's just like 'Knock yourself out!'

Actually it's going to be pretty interesting when the rainy season gets here because all of the rivers are this low, but all of them have these heavy-duty concrete banks in place. Does that mean that the rivers get really full? In any case, the flood defences do mean that there's a lot of lovely green spaces to hang out in, which Kyoto is otherwise kind of lacking.

I like that there are a lot of flowers grown in public spaces around here, like by the side of the tram tracks on the way to uni, or here, at the top of the bank by the car park of the convenience store:

It was really nice to spend a day out in the sun, before it starts to get tooooo hot here (and I have it on good authority that it will...). Hopefully we'll be able to use the grill again before the rains come!

P.s I went to the Kitano Tenmangu flea market yesterday and got this gorgeous yukata (summer kimono) for summer festivals! I can't wait to wear it!

Okayama and Hiroshima

This is me slowly catching up with myself. After this trip, I only need to tell you about the farming experience I did, and then we're writing in real time! And there's a lot going on - the cherry blossoms are blooming, everything is coming alive. Including my hayfever, which meant a slightly baffling trip to the drugstore to get tablets (the lady was very friendly and understanding, my Japanese just wasn't quite up to the task. Though I've now got something which appears to be working, so, you know, sort of a success).

I went to Okayama and Hiroshima on a 5 day trip at the beginning of the month. You can get a train ticket for just over 10,000 yen that gives you unlimited travel for 5 non-consecutive days during the spring holiday. The only condition is that you have to travel on local trains. But, while the shinkansen may well have been more comfortable, I really enjoyed watching the landscape slowly change as I journeyed west. You wind through little valleys that have been levelled for fields, but the impossibly steep hills have been left covered with trees, so they look like islands rising from a sea of grass. Sometimes you see the entrance to the shrine creating a gap in the trees, and a stone staircase that disappears quickly into the forest.
(In short, it feels like My Neighbour Totoro country).

My first stop was the city of Okayama. This was mainly to give me a place to stay before getting up super early and going to Naoshima, the art island. But since I was there, I had a little look around.

They have a bike hire scheme like the Boris Bikes in London. I couldn't help but adore the pun of the name: bikes like this with a little basket are called 'mama chari' in Japanese, and Okayama is famous for being the home area of the legendary Momo Taro. So, these bikes are called 'Momo Chari'.

 This is the castle in Okayama. It's painted black and must have been pretty intimidating for would-be intruders. They had a few interesting exhibits about the history of the castle inside, but the best thing was the view from the top.

 Next stop was the garden across the river, called the Korakuen. It's described as one of Japan's best three landscape gardens. (But seemingly everywhere you go is one of the best three something-or-other. I wonder who decides these things?) It was pretty lovely, anyway, despite the fact that the grass lawns that truly make it spectacular in the summer were a bit dead.

Everything was pretty dead, in fact, except for the blaze of white and pink plum blossoms at the end of the garden.

After a lovely evening with the very friendly owners of the guesthouse where I stayed(http://toriikuguru.com/), I headed out bright and early to get to Naoshima just in time for the art galleries to open. You head out of Okayama for an hour, and then jump on a ferry. This is the view across the Inland Sea.

The island's main sources of income are the many art galleries that have sprung up (mostly created by Tadao Ando, also known as the architect behind the Tokyo Sky Tree) and also the large waste disposal facility. The sign next to this sculpture by the side of one of the roads crossing the middle of the island said that it was built as a merging of these two factors. I was just a little surprised to find this kind of modern sculpture on a quiet wooded road to the side of a lake...

This garden outside the Chichuu Museum is inspired by the Waterlilies painting by Monet that are displayed inside. No waterlilies to show this early in the year, though the other flowers were lovely.

I found this cat outside one of the Art House Projects. They're how I heard about the island. The towns there were just your normal island towns, slowly becoming abandoned as people moved away to the mainland for jobs etc. but a couple of them were bought by this project and transformed into spaces for modern artists to display their work. I enjoyed stepping over the threshhold not knowing what was inside, so I won't spoil that for you, in case you go. But I did have my favourites, and one of them was the converted temple outside which this little cat was sunning itself. (The other was an old-style house just down the road).



 This is a view over the town from the shrine that's part of the project.

 After I got back to the mainland, I hopped on and off trains for four hours to finally make it to Hiroshima. The dormitory there was comfortable, and I spent an interesting time there. I met a Japanese lady who told me that she had been living in Fukushima and now has no home to go back to, so she lives in that dorm. She was very lovely, gave me lots of tips about my visit, and at the end presented me and another travelling student with a little necklace each. I was really glad I got to meet her.

I walked over to Hiroshima Castle the next morning. In truth, it was pretty similar to the one in Okayama, just a little bigger. I think I prefer my castles ruined and somewhere remote in Scotland, but in Japan they rebuild them to show you exactly what they would have looked like from the outside. I liked the moat, anyway, because it was a lovely day.

 This is the A-Bomb Dome, after I went to the Peace Museum. It was a pretty tough museum to walk through, though I'm glad I did. I feel sorry for the security guard who was standing at the end of some of the most emotionally painful exhibits. He must see a parade of depressed faces all day.

 The next day I wandered over to Shukkeien Garden. It's much more compact than Korakuen (and surrounded by modern buildings on all sides). Its name actually translates to 'Shrunken Scenery Garden', and I loved the way they've created little mountains and valleys.

 Naturally I had to have Hiroshima okonomiyaki at some point during the trip. It's a bit different to the Osaka version, though I can't decide which one I like better. The Hiroshima ones do at least make for nicer pictures, to show how tasty okonomiyaki really is (the Osaka variety tends to look like a hot mess).

 Having fueled up on okonomiyaki I made my way down to another port, this time on the way to Miyajima. This is the island famous for its shrine gate that stands in the sea. I didn't know when I went, but apparently it's not actually fastened down to anything. It's just a master work of careful balancing (how they did that with the tide and all, I do not know). At very low tide you can even walk out to it.

 I stayed over on the island at a ryokan (traditional guest house) and had food so amazing that I forgot to get you photographs, as I was too busy tucking in. The ryokan was in a little bay, and the views were amazing out across the sea to the lights of Hiroshima on the mainland.

In the morning, I decided to climb the main mountain before I had to leave at midday. Mt Misen has a long history as a sacred place, in part due to the big boulders that are lying about. On the way up, there were a few of these overhangs, and if you look closely, you can see that people have left tiny Buddha statues and offerings underneath.

 There's an observationa platform from the top with phenomenal views. It's the highest point on the island, and may well be the highest point for a good few miles, so you have a perfect view of the islands that are scattered around.

 The climb up is supposed to be about 90 minutes to 2 hours, and I'd done it in 1 hour (as I sat panting on a bench halfway up, a very energetic old Japanese man came striding past, commenting on how well I was doing. As he sailed past. And I slumped on a bench. It was nice of him to say so, anyway.). Given that, and the fact that I had to make it back to Kyoto on local trains that day, I chickened out of the walk back down and took the cable car instead.

 

Next time I'll write about the other trip to Hiroshima, this time farming in the remote countryside!

 

 

Tokyo Part 3

So finally I've gotten round to telling you the very last things I wanted to write about Tokyo! 

There won't be so many pictures, because we ended up spending a lot of time over the last 3 days in museums and galleries. I haven't really been going to look at exhibitions in Kyoto, and I realised with this trip that I'd actually really missed it. So one of my resolutions for this next term is to make the most of the fact that Kyoto has a lot of art and craft stuff going on.

That resolution actually includes making sure that I get back to Tokyo to go to the Studio Ghibli museum again. (For those that don't know, Studio Ghibli is an animation studio that makes deep, beautiful films, and is internationally acclaimed).

I could write an essay on how much I loved it, but that would contain spoilers about what it's like in there, and I really recommend going without knowing, because it was fun to properly explore it. I think it was probably designed that way.

In any case, it's in a lovely area, inside the local park. Walking in the sunshine along a tree-lined path, it felt like entering the world of Ghibli before you even make it to the site.

When you get through the gate, there's no doubt that you're in the right place, with this Totoro ticket booth. 

I bought two art books of the museum in the shop, and the first page of one is Miyazaki's mission statement of how he wanted the museum to be. One of his plans was that it would not be a dusty display of past works, but something much more interactive and engaging, and I have to say I think they did it. You don't come away knowing more about the technical details of a particular film you liked, but you do come away with a lasting sense of the world that the people at Ghibli work with, and in. 

I also came away very very happy that I got a picture with a robot from Laputa, because I always loved them.

The next day was full of robots, actually. We went to the artificial island Odaiba, where there's the Museum of Emerging Sciences (the Miraikan). There are super interesting exhibits about a wide range of new technologies in the pipeline, a floor on space exploration, and a chance to see Honda's robot ASIMO live.

 On the way back, we went via the giant Gundam Warrior (the inspiration for Pacific Rim). There's a light display, and the robot moves its head around. Having just seen ASIMO run, dance, and kick a football, it was less impressive than it might have been...

(In fairness it would be terrifying if a statue that big suddenly started dancing)

The next day we headed over to the Museum of Contemporary Photography. The exhibitions were both good, but the best thing I came away with was actually from the shop - they had the book 'Moomin Valley Midwinter' in Japanese. The Moomins are hugely popular in Japan right now, and actually when I travelled by Finnair last month they were selling special Moomin merchandise that you can only buy on the Helsinki/Japan flights. I've always been vaguely terrified of the stories, so not only did I want to see what they were actually about, I thought reading a children's book would be just about right for my level of Japanese (it was!). In the end it was also a very thought-provoking book, like all the best kids' things are. The only problem is that now I really want to buy Moomin products, and in Japan temptation is everywhere...

So that was Tokyo. Stay tuned next time for pictures from the trip I did last week to Okayama and Hiroshima!

Tokyo Part 2 (Nikko)

Hello! It's been a while, I know, I'm sorry! I was about to write about the lovely trip I just took along the coast to Hiroshima, but realised that I never finished writing about my time in Tokyo. So here's the trip to Nikko:

Like I wrote last time, Nikko is the place where the first Tokugawa shogun is buried. To get to it you have to take a long train ride out of the city, and we saw Mt Fuji in the distance! Nikko is right up in the mountains, and although it was a little cold in Tokyo, we still weren't expecting this fountain;

The area is covered with temples and shrines - also hotels, actually, all seemingly closed, because the high season in Nikko is when the autumn leaves are at their best. Felt a little like a ghost town in January though... In any case, the first temple we walked past looked like this:

They'd constructed an entire building around it and drawn the temple on... (You could still go inside and pray and stuff, it just felt a little strange...)

From there we went to the site of the shogun's tomb, which, luckily, wasn't undergoing such big renovations.

The stable of the sacred horse that lives on the site is also noteworthy: it's decorated with the 'See no evil, hear no evil..,' monkeys.

Then we went on a walk around other smaller notable shrines. The mountain seems full of little holy springs and special wishing rocks. We found this stone dating back a couple of hundred years asking pilgrims to kindly refrain from relieving themselves in the holy forest of the mountain.

Also this little guy who someone had left at a shrine:

To end the walk we went down to the gorge, where there are a famous line of Buddhist statues, nicknames the 'bake jizo' (ghost Buddhas) because it is said that if you count them one way, and then count them again, you will end up seeing a different amount...

We didn't try to count them...

I don't know if the legend stems from it, but there were actually more statues until a great flood about 100 years ago, where many were swept away by the river that runs through the gorge. The people who live there did their best to find and return as many of the statues as they could, so along towards the end of the line are a couple of piles of rocks that may or may not have previously been statues.

(They get their own red hats and aprons anyway) 

Having been wandering on the cold all day, it was about time for something warm, so we got a really tasty set dinner with the local speciality yuba (it can be translated as tofu skimmings, but that makes it sound a lot less nice than it is).

The cup was adorable too:

So that was Nikko, I highly recommend it! Also they seem to be trying to attract foreign tourists, because we got about a 1000 yen discount on the return ticket, which helped.

I was going to write about the next couple of days here, but this post is going on a little long! I'll write about the Studio Ghibli museum and seeing the robot Asimo live in a couple of days. And this time I mean a couple of days, not 5 weeks. (Probably).

Tokyo Part 1

I'm back from a 5 day trip to Tokyo and to celebrate I came down with a cold... Actually I think it's just one of those end of term things, but I'm glad it did hold off while we were enjoying our adventure~

We went by overnight bus, which actually felt a lot like being in a plane, only it deposited us right at Tokyo station, not at an airport another 2 hours away by train... I would definitely recommend the bus if you're on a budget (though if you're not, why would you even consider anything other than the Shinkansen?!) We arrived bright and very early, left our bags at the Ueno station, near our hostel, and went exploring!

A beautiful tree in Ueno park.

Ueno is famous for its zoo, so a lot of stuff in the area (vending machines, flower displays) is panda themed, including this panda bun that I just had to buy. Each one had its own expression, but my favourite was this mildly disappointed and disgruntled one.

We wound up in the gardens of the Imperial Palace, which are very quiet and full of nature, but are also surrounded on every side by tall office blocks.

Oh, and this awesome moat.

On our wanderings we found an area called Jimbocho which is famous for second hand book stores ( Tokyo has lots is specialised districts, Jimbocho is right nice to the area for big skiing and winter sport department stores...). This shop extended right out of the building and down an alley to the side.

After a quick journey to check into our hostel, we headed straight out to the other side of the city despite our painful feet (at this point, 3ish, we had been walking near constantly since we arrived in Tokyo at 8am). We walked through Harajuku, which I loved, and headed to watch the crossing at Shibuya from the Starbucks that looks out across it. It was kind of late by that time, so we didn't quite get to see it in its full rush hour glory, but it was still relaxing just watching the ebb and flow of people, and, it being Tokyo, they were all pretty interesting people.

That's it for part 1 ~ in a few days I'll tell you all about Nikko, the day trip we did to where Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Edo period (I.e. when I say shogun, it's him and his family you're thinking about) has his tomb.

~

Shunkoin and Miyako Messe

This weekend I decided that the best way to prepare for the four exams I have this week was to go and explore some cultural exhibitions across town. Obviously. 

On Saturday, a local temple was hosting a zen arts experience, taught by IB students from a high school affiliated with my university. I ended up meeting a couple of friends from my course there, both of whom also did the IB at school! It was interesting to hear what the students get up to on the IB in Japan.

Also, of course, we got to have a go at calligraphy, raking of stones in the zen garden, and we took part in a tea ceremony.

This is my very first attempt at calligraphy! The character means 'Japanese'. It's not the worst first attempt, but I don't think it'll pave my way to becoming a calligraphy master any time soon...

This is the garden that we tried raking. The deal with raking is that you've got to try to create perfectly straight lines, while thinking of nothing else but the moment. Hard to stay in the moment when you're all too aware that if you take one step too far backwards you'll end up stuck in the branches of one of these lovely trees... It was really cool getting to actually walk in a garden like this, instead of just viewing it from the veranda.

Although, speaking of which;

I really liked this temple; it was very beautiful and calm, and also incredibly welcoming. You can even stay there overnight as a tourist.

The next day I went to a bonsai exhibition at the Miyako Messe exhibition centre. Here are some of my favourites:

I thought the lone fruit hanging off this bare tree looked a little sad, but my friend pointed out that from this angle it kind of looks like the moon seen through the branches. I was lucky I went to the exhibition with such a poetic person!

The other fun thing about Miyako Messe is that in the basement is the museum of traditional crafts, which was super interesting! Every Sunday it also features a dance by a real maiko (an apprentice geiko, or geisha)

She was incredibly graceful and I wish I could try on a kimono like the one she's wearing.

On the way home we cycled along the canal to the Kamogawa river (much like London, the arty district is found in the old industrial area and there are a few canals around there). It looked like all the trees were cherry trees, so they must look amazing in the spring, but I actually also really liked how they all looked without any leaves against the grey sky.

Almost forgot to mention, but I also experienced a magnitude 7 earthquake! Don't worry, you would have seen it on the news if anything that major had really happened! Outside the Miyako Messe the fire department were having a community information day or something, which included a truck rigged up to simulate earthquakes.

You sit at a table and tell the guy in charge what magnitude you'd like, then the system counts down and you get your earthquake. I'd heard that once it reaches 5 or 6 you can't stand, but at 7 I could barely stay in my chair, even clutching tight to the desk! It was scary, but I'm glad that we ran across something like this. So far I've only experienced very mini earthquakes, and this made me feel like if a bigger one does come along I'll be less likely to panic.

And now that I've terrified my family with all of this talk of earthquakes, here's some soothing pictures of the woodland walk I took today in the local nature reserve (5 minutes away from my dorm):

This week is the last week of term so it's full of tests, but then the two month spring holiday begins! I've got lots of fun trips planned, starting with Tokyo as soon as we're officially finished, on Tuesday. I'm really excited to go and see that other side of Japan.