I’ve had so many posts on my mind in the past couple of
weeks, but somehow I haven’t had time to write them. Life’s been busy. 24 hours
of classes/week is quite a lot... There have been some exams, one term paper
outline (the deadline for which was today, and I swear it was harder to do that
outline than it’ll be to do the essay), presentations and whatnot… but I think
I’ll write a post about that stuff some other day. When I feel like it...
The weather has been turning colder. It’s positively chilly.
People keep on saying stuff like “but you’re from Finland! You can’t be cold!”…
well, yeah. Compared to Finland it’s not that cold here at all. But the Japanese
cold is different from Finnish cold. Finnish cold is sharp and crisp, Japanese…
this sneaky chillness that literally goes to the bone and marrow. Maybe it’s
the humidity? Another thing is that it’s cold inside, too. My apartment is
impossible to keep warm… or maybe that could be done if I kept the air-conditioners
blowing all time, but I don’t want to see what kind electricity bills I’d get
after that.
Besides, I don’t like aircon. And it’s located right over
the table where I have my laptop, so if I’m sitting there, as I’m right now,
the air from the aircon is blowing straight at my head, which is unpleasant.
(It is on now, by the way. And I’m hiding from it underneath a blanket. Am very warm at the moment. 🙂 )
…I’ve now twice got some random alert that the bath’s
plumbing is freezing, or whatever. How? It’s not even below zero out there, and this is inside.
>_>
This. It gave me heart attack yesterday morning, when this
thing gave a loud alarm when I was right beside it, and suddenly a Japanese
voice started talking something I didn’t quite understand. xD
Seriously.
Anyways. I’ve done also some fun stuff during this time, but here’s
just a quick summary…
First there was the Takatori samurai festival, which was an
awful lot of fun. It took a couple of hours to go there by train. Went there
with a friend, and we were basically the only foreigners there. xD People kept
on trying to guess where we are from, but when one is from Finland and the
other from Luxembourg, that wasn’t so easy. xD
(You get these tiny v ids full screen from the bottom corner, you know!)
(You get these tiny v ids full screen from the bottom corner, you know!)
Then, the university festival…. Which I mostly missed. I had
planned to go there during the weekend, but somehow didn’t have time. So I was
there only for Thursday evening when it started. Saw at least the bonfire…
A big part of Saturday I spent at the flea market at Kitano
Tenmangu shrine. They hold it every month on the 25th. Awful place.
xD Too much stuff. And places where you can get a plastic bag for 500 yen, and
the fill it with used kimonos and stuff…
And then got invited on a river boat ride on Hozugawa. It
was awesome.
And lastly, kind of off-topic (if there now is any topic), but before I again forget... Someone asked me a while ago about the name of my journal,
so I thought I could say a few words about it. I’m awful at naming things. And making
decisions. I kept on postponing making this journal because I couldn’t decide
on the name. I wanted to have something about Kyoto, or maybe language, or both. At
first I thought of something like kyokotoba, which is the term for the Kyoto
dialect (kotoba = word, language), but it felt kind of off… But kotoba actually gave me idea for this
name: it consists of two kanji, 言 (say; word) and 葉 (leaf). So I though of words as kind of leaves of language,
and as I’m here for autumn term, falling words felt kind of fitting. That name
was taken, though, so I had to add something after it. Also the Kalevalan
phrase “puheet putoelevat” came to my mind, literally something like “ the
talks/words are falling” (from the mouth). So, here we go. What's in a name, anyway?
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