Holiday studies...

Tomorrow I’ll have been two weeks in Japan. The beginning hassle isn’t yet quite over, but we’re (thankfully) getting there. I’ll have a pretty full schedule, but I’ll post more about my courses once I know for sure which I take – still considering between a couple. 

The past days I’ve mainly tried to get all every day stuff into order. Finding the Hundred Yen Shop was really useful, I’ve got from there so many things from toilet brush and a mini frying pan to coat hangers and chopsticks... not to mention many other maybe not so necessary (but fun) minor things...  I keep on calling that place hyaku man shop instead of hyaku en shop, by the way. Have to be careful before that becomes true to me, at the rate I’ve been shopping there. (Man = ten thousand, hyakuman = million.)

Amid the shopping and move-in procedures I’d have also wanted to explore the city a bit, but haven’t had much time for that. Yesterday evening I biked shortly to the Philosopher’s Path. It’s probably not at its best this time of the year, but I’ll be sure to go back there when autumn comes. Too bad I won’t be here anymore when the cherry blossoms…

Not a very sharp photo, the next one, but there was a funny bird in the bush... ^^

There were some nice shops there. I didn’t explore those too much, but I think I’ll have to return there some day. Bought two coasters from one place, one has words in kyokotoba (Kyoto dialect, have to figure out what they mean) and the other reminds of my favorite anime (first episode of Mononoke, anyone?)

Today I did some involuntary exploration. It was the Sports Day, which is a national holiday… but at Kyodai we sometimes live in a world of our own (there will come some days, as our Japanese teacher put it, when the rest of Japan has a Tuesday, but in the university it's Friday, and so on). So we still had our Japanese classes today. No other classes were held, but what of that – I have no other classes on Mondays. >_> It was a really beautiful day, so I decided to bike to the uni by the river, which isn’t the shortest way, but is by far the nicest. And somehow, once more displaying my incredible skills of inobservance, I didn’t notice the place where the rivers join into one and where I should have turned away.

This place, that is. Though I was coming from the opposite direction, following the river on the right, so maybe it’s not that easily noticed as from here… right? *cough*

Anyway, I biked and biked and at some point started to wonder if I’d passed places like this before… but then again, I’ve taken that route only a couple of times, and I  know I’m quite unobservant, so I thought it’s perfectly possible I just had not noticed these places before. After a while I was still beginning to have serious misgivings about it all – it surely shouldn’t take this long – and paused, and finally asked a couple of girls in which direction Imadegawa street is. And then turned and biked back nearly a kilometer or something. 

Well, could have been worse. I’d left really early, cause I was planning to first eat and then continue preparing for the lesson. Arriving at the university I again remembered that hey, yes, it’s the Sports Day, and the whole place is closed (except for our Japanese class, yay) and I couldn’t get food anywhere. I was beginning to run out of time, so I hurried to a nearby shop that was open and got some snacks. And then went to the Japanese class all sweaty from all this extra biking. It was a hot day, alright…

…and there were so many people enjoying their holiday by the river. Lying in the sun, wading in the water, reading… one girl was playing guitar, a group of young people had a grill with them… I’d have so wanted to go to cool down by the water a bit, but nah, good girls go to their Japanese classes, even on holidays, don’t they. 

But all this biking wasn’t completely in vain. I saw a really pretty butterfly, which apparently was a common bluebottle. Common to some, maybe, but not to me. Too fast to get a photo of it. Later I snapped one pic of this… bird. Stork? Whatever. Bird. By water. With yellow flowers. Unsharp, but what else is new. ^_^