Night Crawling

Though last night ended fairly early, today was certainly more than I expected. Weekends had been pretty uneventful and quiet so far, but this Saturday was plenty full. I woke up relatively late, considering how early I’ve been up since getting here. I had talked to several people about getting out into the city since I have to write several papers about it, plus I needed to buy a bike to get around Kyoto. I had used the bus system a lot, but there are a lot of places that are too short to take a bus but too far to walk. One of the other girls and I had decided to go out and try to buy a bike, but luckily one of the guys who has been here for a semester stopped by right as we were getting ready to leave. We walked down to the bike shop where I bought my new bike for 6000 yen. It is blue and has a basket and a rattrap on the back, where I could carry someone else or strap on a large object. It came complete with a lock, a light, and a bell. It even had a name: Sweet Lib. The handlebars are positioned very differently than any I have ever used before, but I came close to getting used to them. After picking up our bikes, we headed out on the town. The mission was to find Beavis and Butthead do America, but it was not such an easy task. We had to go to quite a few stores and it took most of the day. Along the way, we got to go to a lot of fun places. There are two chains of really inexpensive stores in Japan. One is a kyuju-kyu store, which is 99 yen, and the other is a hyuaku en store, which is 100 yen. I got to look through a lot of them, and they certainly have more useful items than a dollar store back home. The nice ones have entire sections for arts and crafts, the kitchen, hardware, wooden products, food, toys, beauty products, etc. One girl even bought a pestle there! I bought some really great stationary to send letters home on, when I get the chance. I could not find what I was really looking for, though, which was a set of sumi-e supplies: ink, grinding stone, and brush. At one point, we stopped at Izumiya, which is a really large department store that combines clothing, electronics, and groceries all in the same building. Imagine a really nice version of Wal-Mart and you would only begin to brush the ice. The buildings are usually several stories. It was getting close to lunch time, so we decided to eat. We were eating at the bakery, which has a lot of good bread/meat/cheese combinations, but one of the girls that was with us is a vegetarian, and we weren’t sure what didn’t have meat in it. Since we couldn’t read the signs, we were just going to give up, but one of the guys with us spoke good Japanese, so he went to ask the clerk. He was trying to ask if there was meat in a certain dish, but instead, because the words sound so alike, he accidentally said “cat” instead. So the woman looked at him quite strangely. He quickly rebounded from his mistake, but the rest of us were hysterical. We headed in the direction of Heian Temple, and got to spend a while there, looking around. After biking around for a little longer, we headed downtown. We finally found the movie! and decided to go out for dinner. There was a restaurant that charged the exact same price for all of its menu items, so we all got different foods that looked interesting. I got a cheese fondue and what ended up being a fish cake which were both very good, yet it is still a challenge to order food here in Japan, because although I know a lot of words for general foods, I am not that great at reading Japanese yet, so I struggle. You can try to go by the pictures, but sometimes they can be misleading. Dinner was good, and perhaps the best part, one of the guys with us paid for it. Just did it, without saying anything…and refused to let us pay him back! It’s always nice to be around a gentleman. At this point, we decide to go home, but we also decide to ride though the Gosho, which was all gravel. I came very close to wiping out a couple times, so it looked like I needed some bike practice. And believe me, I got it. I ended up getting lost with one of the other girls who is new to the center, and it was quite a while before we found our way home. We did it, though, using the bus stop maps as a guide, and a little bit of Japanese to ask people if they could point us in the right direction. We did make it home, and celebrated by staying up until about 4 AM. It was a little much, but my first extraordinarily late night since I’ve been here, so I enjoyed it.

Music equivalent of the day: Getting lost in Kyoto
Major purchase: Sweet Lib, my bike
Food: fish cake and cheese fondue
Meditation/ inspiration/ thought of the day: the woodwork at the Heian Jingu (shrine)
Top priority: seeing more of Japan, visiting temples