Currently I am sitting on the benches surrounding the Kyoto Seika canteen at 10:56AM. It's slightly chilly in the shade, but the sun is quickly approaching my side of the table and the forecasts go up to 76 degrees Fahrenheit today. Until future notice, this will be where I'll be writing my blog posts. Hopefully this becomes a daily ritual so I don't fall behind anymore. I don't want to forget any of my time here, and while I know that's impossible, it's good to write while memories are still fresh in my mind. I'm getting some cobwebs already and the only things saving me are referencing my own twitter and camera. Yeah, in another life I would probably be a goldfish.
This post is a bit of a amalgamation of a bunch of things that happened in the first week I came to Kyoto. Most of them involve getting lost, confused, or just dazed. That's why this series is called "Getting Lost in Kyoto". The next post about Fushimi-Inari will be the last as well as probably the most exciting in this series about getting lost. (I have since stopped getting lost. Well. Kind of.)
じゃ、始めます！
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On the way!
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First of all, let's talk about conbinis. Konbini is short for "convenience store" and if you're from the American suburbia like I am, you don't really go to these places much. They're kind of like...a place you might stop by to buy a snack while refueling your car. But even I didn't do that much because it was considered a waste of money. Basically what I'm saying is that I don't even remember if I've ever gone into a 7-Eleven or Wawa for anything else than the bathroom. Maybe your experience is different than mine and you are a frequent customer of your local convenience store. However, this is my blog. And from what I have experienced, Japanese konbinis are almost a totally separate animal from their American cousins.
There are several konbini chains in Japan. The two most frequently seen are 7-Eleven and Lawson. (I see FamilyMart a lot around here as well. And one called "Daily"?) But labels aside, they're all quite similar on the inside. (Except for Lawson, where you go to purchase or pick up concert/event/travel tickets. You can probably do that in other konbinis, but I've only gone to Lawson so far for that.) Basically a konbini is a mini grocery store filled with delicious, useful, and cheap things. Everything is super organized, clean, delicious, and useful. The products range from toiletries to stationery to fruit to fresh pastries/onigiri/bento to all manners of drinks to cheap snacks and candy etc. It does sound painfully standard on paper, but it's something you have to visit for yourself. I've gone to a few supermarkets and they honestly just look like giant konbinis to me because all the brands are the same. The supermarket just happens to have more of them. And the giant bottles of water are cheaper in a conbini. (I get a giant bottle?????? for 93 yen from the local Lawson. Less than a dollar.)
I guess what hits me most is how clean and new the stores always feel. The ready-to-eat food is actually delivered and replenished frequently throughout the day (and they even have fresh steamed buns where the US convenience stores usually have those corn dogs that probably haven't been touched for who knows how long...).
Of course, the best thing is that you can literally find a convenience store almost every 500m from each other. There are literally so. Many. Convenience. Stores. Iwakura's considered a pretty sparse place in Japan and there are 5 konbinis within 10 minute walking distance from the dorm. FIVE! (This goes up to 6-7 once you increase walking time to 20 minutes)
All of this leads up to my first journey to a conbini, Circle K. (I'm awful at map reading so I mistakenly thought it was the closest one to the dorm. I was corrected later that day.) This was the second day I was in Kyoto. I had gone to bed without dinner the night before because I was so. Tired. I woke up at 7:30AM feeling incredibly hungry, so I decided to get some onigiri at a convenience store. At that point my phone was just a glorified alarm clock and dictionary, so I looked up directions on google maps, took a picture, picked up my map from my exchange student packet, and set off. I aimed to make it back in 30 minutes. It took me 90. (This was supposed to be a 10 minute walk....)
I think I was just slow on the walk there because my eyes were bugging out of my head, trying to take in the view. I didn't get lost, actually. I was just trying to absorb what I saw. Iwakura is a really pretty place to live. Instead of apartment buildings, there were mostly houses with walled in gardens teaming with trees and flowers. There's a bamboo grove in the back of the dorm. The Eidan train line runs along the edge of town, a river flows down the center, and there were a lot of cherry blossoms. (I'll get around to a blog post, or video, of the area once...I...catch up on blog posts...)
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| On the way~ |
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| So many small greenhouse gardens everywhere |
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| Mt. Hiei! Looks gorgeous no matter what weather... |
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| I'm really fond of these trees. |
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| So many tiny gardens hidden behind walls! Everything is super compact. |
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| Tanuki for good luck in front of a health center |
I got to Circle K, picked up two onigiri....when my eyes fell on....the orange sausages from my childhood! Fish sausages!! I think I might have scared the employees a little with how excited I looked. Seriously though, I might have only one photo from my childhood where I'm eating this sausage, but I know it was one of my favorite snacks back that. I thought about it constantly and one my goals in Japan was to find them and eat them. I hoped they were as delicious as I remembered they were. (And yes. They were delicious. And I almost cried. Again.) I remember one of the onigiri I got was tuna mayo flavored. I forget what the other one was, but regardless they were both delicious. I actually ate them while walking back to the dorm.....this was before I found out that it's frowned upon to eat and walk at the same time in Japan. Sorry random pedestrians.
Of course no journey is complete without getting lost. It took me close to an hour to wander back to the dorm. I actually went so far in the other direction I passed by a 7-Eleven and then I knew I was definitely in the wrong place. So I rounded back to Circle K and, using my own photos taken while getting there, I found the correct place to turn. Then I passed a park that I hadn't seen on my way there and I knew I was lost again. But seeing a park and remembering all my childhood memories of....crying at a park, which made me so happy that I didn't feel panicked that I had no idea where I was. In fact I swung on the swings for a little bit and then ate my last onigiri on a bench. Then I got up and started walking again.
I remembered the general direction that I had come from, and knew that once I crossed the train line I would be really close to my dorm, so getting back was really only a matter of time. I didn't really have any other options. The streets were bare, my phone had no data, and all I had was a small map and a general sense of direction. I did, eventually, get back though. And that's all that matters. And I immediately shared my excitement over my fish sausages with everyone. They were not impressed. Oh well - more for me!
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| my memory |
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| study of actual fish snack! |
(Update from present Daney: It is now the end of May and I am Incredibly Behind on everything because Golden Week and homework snuck up to sucker-punched me in the face. I'm finally caught up and will dedicate these couple days to catching up. Let's go! よしゃー！)
The day after I went to Kyoto Botanical Gardens, I sat down at night and decided to back up my photos like a responsible technologically able person of the digital age. The week before I left for Japan, my laptop (which was already on its last legs) took a fatal nose dive down the stairs and I was left with less than 7 days to acquire a new machine and retrieve my data. Even though I successfully extracted my hard drive, it had become corrupted and I spent a nightmarish week trying to retrieve anything I could get. I got most of the important things (I think), but data that I had been building and saving since my middle school days were gone. I had backed up the most important things a month or so earlier, so I wasn't too scared about my art and such.
Either way, this is all to say I was already Incredibly Sensitive to data loss and hard drive corruption. Now you can guess what happened next - as soon as I had transferred all the photos I had taken in Japan thus far to my external drive and deleted them from my camera, my hard drive decided to have a fatal error. I think I sat there staring at my computer for almost an hour before leaving everyone back in the lounge to have a private break down in my room. I already had a license to a data retrieval software which I promptly applied to my external. I stared at it hopelessly for 3 hours before I decided to go to sleep and see what the morning yielded.
In the morning I checked my computer, and the program was done retrieving...but it had done that thing where they retrieve all the folders but none of the content IN the folders. I almost cried until I realized I could try to apply the software on my camera memory card. This took only two hours to scan and retrieve, and voila, though a few photos were still corrupted, I managed to get the photos I had deleted from it already! I had my photos back! I had been stuck in 12 hours of awful anxiety and I felt..so..free. Life feels pretty dark when your computer gets destroyed, the hard drive gets corrupted, and then your external dies....all in two weeks.
This part had little to do with Kyoto...but I would like to remember this experience anyway. Moving on!
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April 6th (yes, this is where I am right now...it'll start moving faster once school starts, though) was exchange student orientation, campus tour, and insurance registration with Kyoto Seika's International Office. I had already met all the exchange students living in the dorm, but there were a few others who lived in their own rented apartments off campus.
When we arrived in the International Office, Kinoshita-san led us to a conference room where everyone was sitting already with pamphlets and paper. We all introduced ourselves, as well as our reason for studying at Kyoto Seika. It was interesting to hear everyone's reason for coming to Japan! I came because I had lived here as a child, which I covered in this post. Rosie came because she wants to study 2D animation in a country where it is still a major component of animated features. Emily came to study manga because she loves comics and wants to learn manga techniques in the country of its origin. Other students also had a variety of reasons to study; Chelsea wanted to study manga because Cooper doesn't offer it, Beth and Bianca came to study painting, Ela came to study video & sound, two students from Germany came to study video games, and another student from France, architecture. We also met an international graduate student in the Manga Research department who wants to develop manga for religious education! I confess that I naturally assumed that many people wanted to come to Japan because they loved its anime/manga culture, probably because that's something I am interested in. It was eye-opening to realize that many people came to Seika because they were inspired by other aspects of Japanese culture and they really didn't know anything about manga/anime. It made me feel a bit close-minded, which I suppose is good, because it means I'm learning new things and widening my perspective.
After self introductions, Ken gave us a little history lesson on the founding and development of Seika. The university had been forward thinking ever since its conception, apparently. It had been borne out of the period of student discontent and protests back in the 60s and 70s, and thus its founding principles directly addressed the issues that students had with the current educational system. Therefore, Seika promotes close teacher-student relationships, freedom of self-expression, and development of the individual. The university became well known for its extensive Manga department, which has been around ever since the beginning.
When he finished the mini-lecture, Ken also went over the numerous pamphlets and papers that he'd handed to us at the beginning of the meeting. There were a lot of rules and guidelines for behavior on campus and at the dorm, but also a lot of information about sightseeing and exploring different places in Kyoto and even throughout Japan. Then we filled out a ton of paperwork, which was all very confusing and took a lot longer than intended. (Thankfully there were English guides...but I'm never ready to answer "What special abilities do you have?" on the spot.)
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| Birdhouse project in front of the Design building. |
The next phase of orientation was a campus tour! Even though Chelsea, Emily, and I had briefly explored the campus beforehand, it was more interesting to walk around with Ken pointing out different buildings, their uses, as well as some fun facts.
I'm continually jealous of Seika's extensive campus. I can't believe they have a peacock enclosure, a deer park, rabbits and roosters, a koi fish pond, a small creek running through campus, a three story library, a state-of-the-art sound recording studio, actual ceramic kilns, interesting and diverse building architecture, a large cheap student cafeteria with an upstairs bakery, two conbinis etc. Just walking through the campus makes me burn with envy.
After the tour, Ken took us to the cafeteria to eat lunch, and then half of us would go with him to the ward office to file our national health insurance paperwork. Before that however, he took the rest of the exchange students to get bikes (I had gotten mine a few days before, after the Illustration orientation). Usually exchange students had to rent or buy bikes, but because the office had a surplus of bikes left by previous exchange students this semester, they lent them out to us to use free of charge. It was honestly very sweet and convenient and made me immensely happy. Kyoto is a city that can really be explored by bicycle - it's more interesting that way, and saves on the train fees as well! The exercise also counterbalances all the ice cream and carbohydrates I've been rapidly stuffing into myself ever since I've touched down in Japan. Basically, I love biking. (Rosie and Emily and can attest to this, since they've been riding behind me numerous times already...and cursing my retreating back view as I speed ahead).
As the rest of the students got their bikes, Rosie and I wandered up to the Accounts office to pay our dorm renting fees. We got up to the office and stood outside the glass doors nervously for a few minutes. Then we went in, and stood around awkwardly until someone asked us who we were looking for. (This is pretty much what we always do now. Actually Initiating Conversation is too terrifying.) We held up our dorm invoices and after some confused glances, calling another person over to help, and some hand motions, Rosie and I successfully paid for the next four months rent. It felt like a success. Small, but a success nevertheless.
The ward office was pretty much as expected - filled with lots of offices, waiting benches, and paperwork. Thankfully there was a rack of children's book that Emily and I flipped through as we waited. Even though children's book have achingly simple vocabulary and grammar, they have little to no kanji - which makes reading them actually more difficult than you would accept. I had to sound out all the words and roll them around a few times on my tongue to figure out what they meant. I read a funny picture book about a fisherman who has a stomach ache and a clueless monk who keeps giving him advice on what to eat to get rid of it. He ends up eating a couple animals, a hunter, and finally a demon.
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| Look at this monk. He can't be trusted. |
We spent most of the time waiting around, and a little time filling out forms to for health insurance and national pension service. At one point, the ward office staff who was helping us complimented me on the color of my hair (bright purple, at the time). Ah, it's so easy to get into my heart. Even though we had been rotting away in the office for hours at that point, I felt happy. (Also, Heisei years are really confusing! I've never heard of it before and I ended up filling in the year incorrectly on all my forms...)
Afterwards we all headed back to school, and Emily and I went back to the dorms for a bit before heading out to go grocery shopping! There's several grocery stores nearby, but the only one I knew at that time was a little bit farther than the closest Lawson. A-Coop is a little more expensive compared to the other grocery stores around, but not by too much.
In front of the store sometimes various vendors spread out items such as clothing, household items, books, etc. to sell for really cheap prices. That night there were crates of cheap books everywhere. Emily and I flipped through them before going into the store and I ended up buying an old copy of the first Doraemon comic for 100 yen. (Since then we have all become frequenters of every Book-Off we come upon....100 yen manga is such a dream.)
I would talk about grocery stores, but I think I can save that for later, when I can take some pictures and do a longer post just about them. For now, I need to catch up. I'm nearly two months behind on posts!!! I swore that wouldn't happen to me...but ....haha...
Anyway, onto the last leg of this post! April 7th, trying to go to Ginkaku-ji and the Philosopher's Path.
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Bright and early (well, around 10AM - 11AM) Emily, Rosie, and I decided to try to bike to Ginkaku-ji, or in English, the Golden Pavilion. It's a pretty well known temple and looked close enough on the map to bike to relatively easily. The path also looked fairly simple and straightforward with only one turn.
For some reason I was leading the group (I'm terrible with directions...why...) and it was a task to try to stay together, especially as we left the relatively open and empty streets of Iwakura and entered a more metropolitan area with narrower streets and more cars. I kept looking behind me to make sure Rosie and Emily were within site. Sometimes we'd get separated by a crossing signal or a crowd of pedestrians, but in general we were together for the first half of the way.
When we got to the first major turn down by Kyoto Univserity, I looked behind me and realized I couldn't see Rosie or Emily. I waited by the major intersection for about 10 minutes, but I didn't see anyone coming up. Because we'd only been in Japan for a week at this point, none of us had any way of contacting each other without Wi-Fi. This also meant if we got lost or separated, it would be a chore trying to find our way back to the dorms. I decided to pedal back to see if Rosie or Emily were just stuck somewhere behind a group of pedestrians, or something like that.
After a few minutes, I saw Rosie pedaling towards me. I felt a wave of relief - well, at least one person is there. And Emily would be right behind her, right? However, Rosie stopped in front of me and told me that the reason she was so far behind was because she had realized Emily had disappeared and decided to turn around to find her. She had ridden back nearly all the way but Emily was nowhere to be found. Apparently she had called out to me earlier....but I hadn't heard.
The thing is, both Rosie and I have smart phones so if we found Wi-Fi, we could at least pull up maps and find our way back to the dorms. Emily didn't and besides, I really didn't want to lose her. So we both decided to retrace our route and see if Emily just got lost somewhere along the path. We rode slowly all the way back to Demachiyanagi station, keeping our eyes on both sides of the road, just in case she somehow had ended up on the other side. No luck. There was nothing for it. We couldn't call her or message her. We could only hope that either she somehow made it to Ginkaku-ji without us, or we would see her at the dorm later.
Thus, we turned back (again!) and pedaled all the way to Ginkaku-ji. By now it was around 3PM-4PM and there was a marked increase of the number of pedestrians. When we passed by the Kyoto University campus, I saw a lot of young college students as well as young foreigners. There are a lot of non-Japanese people in Kyoto, especially once you enter the downtown area. Most of them are tourists, but there are also many that study or work in Kyoto as well. I also saw a huge procession of salarymen/salarywomen on the street across from us. Honestly, they were quite intimidating in their black suits. I thought about all the things I've heard about being a regular company employee in Japan - it's supposedly boring, soul-crushing work. I don't know if it's at all correct, but just based on their clothing, it didn't look like something I would enjoy. My hair is also purple though, so my opinion is biased.
It was pretty obvious that we had hit upon the Philosopher's Path once the city gave way to a stone-paved path lined with cherry blossoms in full bloom and the conversation around us switched from Japanese to mostly English and Chinese. The amount of Chinese-speaking tourists in every tourist-spot I've been to astounds me. It makes me feel somewhat at home, I guess. I also noticed, with some humor, that almost every single young person wandering around these tourist spots in a kimono/yukata have been Chinese. As another person has remarked to me, it's also somewhat humorous that Western tourists usually mistake these people for traditionally-minded Japanese when in reality, they're just as foreign as anyone. I've done my fair share of telling people that I'm not Japanese. I don't get offended when people can't tell East Asians apart from each other - even I'm not correct 100% of the time, and honestly, to many East Asians, Westerners all look the same as well. It's just a matter of experience, I guess.
We parked our bikes next to a wooden fence alongside many other bikes, and decided to eat our food before deciding our next course of action. Before leaving in the morning, all three of us had stopped by Lawson to grab lunch. I got some mitarashi dango and proceeded to destroy 2 of the 3 sticks right outside of Lawson. I ate the remaining stick by the Philosopher's Path and then also ate two onigiri. I had basically been living on onigiri for the past week anyway...
I went to the bathroom right after and left Rosie to guard the bikes. When I came out, to my surprise, there was Emily! I cannot even describe how relieved I was. We wouldn't have to go back and tell the dorm parents we lost Emily! Emily won't be wandering around Kyoto like a lost Ghost pokemon! In the hour we were separated, Emily had fallen behind a group of pedestrians as Rosie and I biked out of sight. Then she took a wrong turn and ended up getting lost. After wandering a little bit, she got directions from a clerk at FamilyMart and found her way to Ginkaku-ji.
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| Look at these cuties. |
To celebrate our reunion...we turned right to the food stalls lined up along the path. Emily and Rosie both got some sort of grilled dango with seaweed stuck on it. I didn't catch the name. I got a long skewer with fried potato wrapped around it - potato tornado! It tasted like delicious never-ending french fries and I totally didn't regret all the grease I got on my face from trying to eat it.
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| What are those??? They look good. |
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| mmmmmmmmMMMMMmmm |
We kept walking along the path and enjoying the cherry blossoms and small creek running alongside us. It was a very shallow creek, but there were fish in it all the same. Other than the tourists, we also saw at least five wedding shoots.
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| Creeping on pretty people... |
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| Rosie, Emily...and more wedding photo shoots. |
After half an hour of walking, we seemed to have reached the end of the path...and no temple in sight! We examined the signs for a bit and realized we had gone in the wrong direction. By that time however, it was around 5PM and most temples close their doors at 4:30PM. We walked back and went to the entrance anyway to check if it was closed. It was, unfortunately. However, we had already had an adventure just getting there, so it wasn't a great loss (to me, at least).
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| best photo of the day. |
One day, I'll head back and see the actual temple! For now, I'm just happy we stayed together and had some good food. We biked back in the rapidly diminishing light and it was around 7PM by the time we got back to the dorms. Thankfully we didn't get lost on the way back, but when we got back to the dorms, Emily said this one memorable line, "I've seen hell, and it's trying to follow Daney while she's biking in the dark". On the way back, to avoid losing Emily again, she rode between Rosie and I. I thought I had stopped at the appropriate times for them to catch up...but because of my navy hoodie ...I had been incredibly difficult to see, and my bike was generally just faster than theirs. I didn't know they had been working really hard to keep up with me until we had arrived back at the dorm. I hope I've improved since then. Maybe I should get a light for the back of my bike? Who knows.
Next up is Emily and Daney's wonderful adventure at Fushimi-Inari...getting lost again, you got it!
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| Not the best photo, but you get the idea. Lots of torii. |
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