Tokyo Sky Tree and lots of delicious food :)

Today was a little rough because we had class from 9am to 5pm to make up for the time when we were in Nikko. Two quizzes today and there's a test tomorrow! And an essay due Wednesday and a survey sheet due Thursday. On Friday we go to the Ghibli Museum. At least I am never bored here but wow, so busy.

Yesterday my family took me to see the new Tokyo Tower, called the Tokyo Sky Tree. It won't be finished until 2012 but it's already taller than the old Tokyo Tower!! It's ridiculously huge. I can't wait to come back to see it in all its glory. :) Can you even grasp how tall this building is right now??? Look at the cranes on the top of it!

 For perspective, here it is from far away with some buildings in the foreground.

We saw this on our way to the PIZZA PLACE because my host family is so caring and they remembered that I was missing pizza and pasta. :D We got one pizza that was half-Italian classic and half-avocado and Thousand Island dressing. ;D 

Japanese pizza is cool!! It's not like American pizza. This other one is Taku-chan's favorite:

Yep, that's boiled egg, hot dog, and potato pizza. :) This is normal here! Click here to check out the menu:

 YUMMMM.

Tonight my family made pasta!!! So good, Namiko-san is Japan's best cook. :D

 Cheese sauce and bacon! :D

 Potato-like things in tomato sauce!

 Last night's dinner, so yummy. It was fried pork (katsu) wrapped around cheese, umeboshi, or asparagus, depending on the plate. I was surprised to like the umeboshi katsu, because I really don't like plain umeboshi. It's too sour for me, but with pork it was great!

I need to go to bed now but I wanted to share a cool thing about my host family's apartment. There isn't a parking garage but they have parking spaces that can be raised and lowered into the ground, and then you drive into your space. The spaces on the top here are the most expensive (rented by the month, I believe) but also the most convenient; my family has the top space. In this picture, you can see a small boy operating the remote control to move his family's car back underground.

Here's another one on the other side of the building. In this one, I believe the bottom space is the most expensive because it takes the least time to park. What a neat way to park a number of cars in a small space!! I believe this is common to places other than just my family's apartment.

Nikko trip weekend! Day 2

The next morning, Sachi, Erica, and I woke up at 7:36am when we had to eat breakfast at 8am, haha. The futons were just too comfortable. Breakfast was again amazing, and again I forgot my camera. Not to worry. :) But there was rice, soup, cooked fish, yogurt with strawberries, tofu skin, seaweed, and various vegetables. YUM.

Immediately after breakfast, Sachi, Robaato-san, Ethan, and I decided to climb the trail behind the bridge we saw yesterday up to a viewing platform. The hike was only .4km but it was pretty tough for me. I need to work out if I want to climb Mt. Fuji!! There were a ton of stairs up to the platform, which had a bell and a beautiful view.

We had to pass through this tunnel to get to the stairs.

After ringing the bell and experiencing the beautiful view, we decided to climb the steps that went above this tunnel and up into the mountains. There was a gate on this trail but we opened it to go through. No problem, right? Well, there were these cute bugs that looked like inchworms all over the old steps. Sachi was freaked out about them because she hates bugs, so she shrieked really loudly and we had to help her get the bugs off her shoes. She put up such a fuss that we started to climb back down. At that point, I realized that despite my efforts to get the worms off my shoes, they just. wouldn't. go. I was even squishing them with my other shoe and they still wouldn't die, and more would appear! At that point I started to get freaked out too, so we booked it down the steps. Once we got down onto the road, I asked for help squishing all the worms on my shoes. It was so scary!!! Then Robaato-san said, "Woah, one of them bit me!" and his ankle was bleeding. Sachi flipped out even more and I was like OH NO, now you're going to get some horrible disease! It was a lot like a low-budget horror movie to me, and then Robaato-san would turn into a giant inchworm and eat us all on the bus. Then Ethan-san said he got bitten too, and we had to keep getting even more worms off of our shoes. 

We got back to our hotel room, quickly took off our shoes, and I jumped in the shower. Not only did I feel unsafe about the worms, but I was really sweaty from the hike. While I was checking my naked self out in the mirror to make sure there were no evil bugs on my body, Sachi and I told Erica the story. As we were telling her, she saw more worms on our shoes and commented on how sweet they were. ;) But Sachi and I knew the truth: they are evil beasts that never die. Once we convinced Erica, she freaked out too and helped us try to kill them. After we thought they were all dead, Sachi found one in the hole in the bottom of her shoe and threw her shoes out right away. But then she didn't have any shoes... so some nice hotel worker gave up her own shoes to Sachi. :) We called them pimp shoes because they were awesome.

Robaato-san and Ethan got bandaids and we figured out that the worms were actually LEECHES. As you can see here, the bites were not very bad but leeches have a chemical in their saliva to stop blood from clotting, so there was  more blood at first than can be seen here. Gross! For a more in-depth creepy experience and to see what the leeches actually looked like and moved like, watch this video about Japanese Mountain Leeches.

 We got on the bus and went to the Takehisa Yumeji Museum, about a famous artist from the 20th century. I had no idea who he was but I ended up loving his style of art so much. I bought a bunch of postcards with his paintings and drawings on them so I can frame them for my apartment. He drew and painted very feminine women in kimonos and later in Western-style dress. We weren't allowed to take pictures in the main gallery, so here is my only picture on the left and following are some Google images of my favorite works of his. I loved nearly all of them that I saw! The woman holding the black cat is his most famous piece.

I was really impressed by his works because his portrayals of women were so beautiful. Nearly every single piece of his work had a woman as the focus. He had some fascinating love stories and various important women in his life, which I feel was pretty evident by his art.

After visiting this museum, we went to the Ryou Ravine. Robaato-san, Ashley, and I ran down the stairs to see the waterfall near the bottom. 

There was a shrine by the waterfall, and Robaato-san rang the bell to say a prayer.

Then we ate the most delicious lunch which we cooked for ourselves on a very hot, porous stone. I wish I could have taken some of the food home with me! I ended up putting some of the mugicha (special tea) into my water bottle so I could drink it on the way home.

The plate of raw food that we cooked. It was recommended to put the cabbage down first and then the meat on top of the veggies so it wouldn't stick to the stone. 

Then we went to the Nikko Handicrafts Center where we learned about the traditional art of wood carving/detailing. We weren't given any time to practice, so we just went straight away on wooden mirrors we were given. Here is my design. It was really hard, so I got discouraged when I messed it up a bit. Oh well, not bad for a first try.

 On the bus ride home, Ethan tried on Sachi's new shoes. :)

 The Japanese countryside was so beautiful. Look at all of that rice!

After we got home, Sachi, Ethan, Robaato-san, and I all went to Nishi-funabashi to find a Japanese sports bar to watch the Japan vs. Netherlands World Cup game and have some osake. It was a fun and interesting experience and that is all anyone needs to know about that. :) I bought some ramen because it was the cheapest thing on the menu but it turned out to be the kind you get in a package, haha. They put a raw egg and veggies in mine, though!

I have been writing blog posts for two hours! It is definitely my bedtime. But here is a picture of a vending machine that sells waffles filled with ice cream, mmmm.

Nikko trip weekend! Day 1

Wow, this weekend was so jam-packed of cool things! Just FYI, there will be a LOT of pictures and I will have to make most of them small so this blog post can be a reasonable length. Please click on the pictures to make them bigger; there is so much detail in all of them that you can't really enjoy them unless you click. :)

Here is a view of outer Tokyo that we passed on our way north to Nikko! We took a nice charter bus with great A/C but no bathroom, haha. I sat with Sachi, and Erica, Ethan, and Robaato-san were right near me. We left the Sumitomo building in Chiba at 9am.

We saw these small shacks by the river and kept asking what they were. Turns out this is where homeless people live. :( The houses are always right by the river so they are very dangerous in the times of flooding aka right now (the rainy season).




Our first stop was Toshogu Shrine, the most exquisitely detailed shrine in all of Japan. Most Buddhist/Shinto shrines have a minimalist style but the designers of this shrine really went crazy with the intricate carvings and paintings. I had to give a short report about Nikko on the bus ride, so I know some more info: the buildings at the Toshogu Shrine (I believe in all there were once 55?) were built over the course of two years in the 1630s by 15,000 craftsmen using 2.5 million sheets of gold leaf. SO PRETTY. I'll let the photos do the talking for now:

Can you believe this detail? These types of carvings were everywhere on all of the buildings.









The entrance.

The famous three monkeys who hear no evil, speak no evil, and see no evil. They originated here! They were carved on the Sacred Stable.

The whole shrine was built in a gorgeous, very old cedar forest.

Shrines often have empty bottles of sake for the gods.

So, so pretty! Some people actually find it gaudy because there is so much color and detail on a place that the Japanese are used to seeing in a minimalist style.

After climbing a ton of steps, Ethan and I found another building that seemed to be wood covered in gold.

The view from the entrance looking towards the sacred stable and the place where you have to wash your hands and mouth before entering the shrine.

I love this part of the shrine. I believe it is a more Buddhist element that is not typically found at Shinto shrines in Japan.

There were a limited number of buildings we could go inside, so I went in all of them that I could. There were even more elaborate paintings and various altars. One building had a dragon painted on the ceiling and a monk clapped some wooden sticks together to create a sound effect like a dragon roaring. I love it when old cultures knew about physics without writing down the formulas.
You could buy omamori, or charms to bring happiness, luck, success, or other spiritual fortunes. There were some for successful studies, safety during traffic, and safe childbirth. I thought they were very beautiful.

Robaato-san indulged in fantasies of being a samurai fighting a battle in the temples, because apparently that occurred during some of the wars. We had to take our shoes off to enter any of the temples, so the floor was really clean. Often tatami mats were used; I have grown to love the smell of tatami mats! I seriously considered putting them in my room in Townhouse Apartments next year, but I think they would be hard to maintain.

After seeing Toshogu Shrine, the bus took us to the Kegon Falls, arguably one of the most beautiful waterfalls in Japan. It was too bad that it was raining because that obscured some of the mountains in the background.

The drive up to the falls was pretty scary because the mountain roads were very curvy and steep. In this particular area, the curves of the road were all designed to look like different hiragana characters, which form the basis of the Japanese alphabet. Experiencing roads shaped like あ、す、の、む、る、な and わ was quite scary!

Along the road, we saw monkeys! I didn't get a clear shot of them, but here they are. They know that tourists to the falls like to feed them, so they come running when they hear car engines. :)




After visiting the Kegon Falls, we drove to our hotel, "Hotel Sunshine Kinugawa" which was a traditional ryokan or Japanese-style hotel. Our floors were tatami mats! As soon as we got there, we marveled at how beautiful our room was and promptly made green tea. Our room had a separate bathtub, toilet, and sink area. There were two closets: one full of futon mats for a ton of people (maybe 6 total?) and the other with yukatas (like a cotton kimono), sashes, and bathroom necessities. The hotel provided everyone with sandals for navigating the hallways but not for outside or for in the room itself.

Here is a picture of our room the following morning, after the hotel staff had lain out our futons and we had slept in them. It was so comfortable for sleeping on the floor! Possibly my favorite thing about the room, other than how spacious and minimalist it was (while still providing for all of our needs), was the sliding panels on all of the walls. As you can see in this picture, at night we closed the panels covered with thin, translucent paper. The smaller room with the closet in it had four sliding panels, so you could really change the shape of our hotel room! I wish I could do that with my apartment.

After arriving, we went outside to see the bridge newly built across the ravine. It was really intimidating to cross, but I loved it. The view seen in this photo is what we saw when we looked outside our hotel room!

Here's the view from the bridge. It was rainy and foggy which created a cool effect.

Our dinner was AMAZING, in traditional Japanese style: sitting on the floor, barefoot, lots of tea, rice, tofu skin (a famous food from Nikko), miso soup, tuna and salmon sashimi, an entire crab, meat cooked right in front of us in a small pot with a flame under it, and more. It was so difficult to eat everything because there was so much! I left my camera in my room but plenty of other people got photos of it. I got annoyed at my classmates who critiqued and at times even insulted the amazing food during the meal and in the presence of our Japanese hosts and our teachers. It's pretty evident that some people never learned manners, but I'm trying not to let it get to me. It's really discouraging, though; I came all this way to have a good time and try to be as respectful as any Japanese person would be, and here are much louder Americans overshadowing my attempts. Oh well...

After dinner, Sachi, Erica, and I quickly went to the hotel onsen, or hot spring bath. We were giggling a lot about getting naked but we did. Our bath was female-only and the other was male-only, then they switched in the morning. The first step was to shower in a group shower to make sure we would be as clean as possible before getting into the bath. There was an indoor bath, which was slightly less hot than the outdoor bath. The indoor bath felt so good! But the outdoor bath was too hot for me and there were scary bugs like spiders and Japanese beetles with pincher claws on their heads near the bath. Soooo we went back in. It was only us three and a few older Japanese women. After about fifteen minutes, we got out, took cold showers, and tested out the products in the dressing room. I dried off and hung around naked for as long as possible because it was fun. :) There was a foot massager and back massager that I really liked. But then our other classmates came in and they all got naked and ran into the onsen. I was glad we had a more private bath.

After we dried off, we found Ethan and Robaato-san and went to the Japanese bar next to our hotel. We had sake, fruity drinks, and edamame. It was delightful! It was so funny to hear about the boys' experience in the onsen.


When we finally got into bed, I slept like a rock. :)
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