My trip to Kyoto

I went to Kyoto today and it was really fun. All this past week, when I would tell my students that I was going to Kyoto on Sunday, they would say, "Oh wow, the leaves are changing right now and it will be SO BEAUTIFUL!!!!!" I kind of thought to myself, "yeah, whatever, I've seen red leaves before, no big deal." But some of the trees had such red, red leaves that they looked like they were on fire. It was really cool.
So the first Buddhist temple we went to was called Sanjusangendon. This temple is pretty famous because it has 1,001 statues inside this super old building of this Buddhist deity called Kannon. The inside of the temple was really really enormous. When I thought that I had reached the end of the 1,001 statues, I realized that I was only half-way! Truly an amazing thing to see. Here are two pictures of the statues inside. These were taken from the middle of the room, so you can see one shot is looking left down the room, and the other is looking down the right.






















After we finished looking at the Kannon statues, we saw a bunch of people choosing these pieces of paper out of a big box. The deal was that you have to pay 100 yen and then you get to choose a fortune from the box. Your fortune can range from really good, to not so good. We all paid the 100 yen and drew one. Mine said "good" but its predictions for my health said that I should watch out for diarrhea! Seriously! It also said that my true love will be late and that I won't marry for a long time. If you don't like your fortune, you're supposed to go outside and tie it to this wooden rack sort of thing. I guess this is kind of like rejecting the fortune. So of course I didn't like mine, so I tied it to the wooden fence thing. Here's a picture of a kid doing the same thing. All of those white things are people's fortune papers.


Here is a picture of another building outside the Sanjusangendon temple:

We went to maybe five different temples or shrines today. Here's a picture of the outside entrance into one of them. It's hard to tell from this picture exactly how humongous this thing is, but imagine that if I was standing in front of that fence sort of thing in the middle, I would only come to about half way up one of the planks. Very enormous.

On our way to see another temple, we took a long, long uphill path that had cemeteries on both sides. I guess Japanese people are usually cremated and so their whole family's ashes (and I mean generations and generations) go into these like 3' by 3' and 5' high stone monument type things. Some we saw were more than 400 years old. We kept walking up this hill and the graves were just covering the hill on both sides, all the way up to the top. So many! Then when we got to the top and looked down the hill to the right and into the valley, we saw thousands of them. Here's a picture from the top:

There were loads more too, going down and down the valley there. Imagine basically a sea of these things. Here's a picture of what they look like closer. You can see how each family's crematorium thing is just centimeters away from the next family's. They really really pack them in like sardines.

It was really crowded everywhere we went today because like I said, apparently this is prime leaf-viewing time for people in Japan. This is a picture from the temple that was at the top of the cemetery hill.

At this temple, they had this thing where people would throw some money into a big box and then grab these long red tassles and start ringing some big bells. They would ring the bells for a while and then start praying. Here's a picture of some women ringing the bells:

This is what they're standing in front of while they pray:

It was a great day. Going to a really historic and traditional place like this reminds me that I live in a foreign country. Here's a picture of the people I went with standing underneath one of the many, many red maple trees we saw today. From the left: Becky, Masashi and Rachel.

Today I went to the Nagoya Aquarium. It was pretty cool. I saw lots of different stuff, I guess what I thought was the neatest were these gigantic crabs. I've seen big crabs before on TV but these were just so much bigger than those. The first picture is of some people looking at the dolphins in this tank. The second picture is from on top of the aquarium. Check out how big that ferris wheel is in the background. We walked over to it later and I couldn't believe how big it was! The last picture is of some kids looking in a big tank of starfish, coral and puffer fish.




The weirdest thing of the whole day was after we left the aquarium and found this like dog-petting-zoo type of place. We paid 300 yen which is about $2.85 to go into this big room and pet all these dogs that were just walking around inside. They had two sides to the room, one side was for big dogs and the other side for little dogs. It was really fun to play with these dogs, but also very strange that this place existed. Here's a picture of this girl I met a few weeks ago and ran into outside of the aquarium, Kendra, petting one of the dogs:

Halloween Party

My school had a whole Halloween week last week. Halloween is not really celebrated or even commonly known in Japan, but I guess since we teach these people English, my boss wanted to have them participate in a western holiday. So all week we had to dress up in costumes. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was a rainbow. On Thursday I was Buzz Lightyear for my kid's classes. And then on Friday and Saturday I was an old lady. My old lady costume was a grey wig, an apron and a scarf tied around my head. My co-worker Yumiko also made me a little name tag that said, "baba". This is the sort of mean word that people use to talk about old ladies. So all my students thought it was pretty funny. On Saturday night we had a Halloween party for the adults at this bar in a neighboring town. Only like 7 or 8 students came though. It was pretty dull and since I was supposed to be like the leader or emcee of the party, I had to make everyone play a game. We played this drinking game that my Australian friend taught me. You basically just go around and everyone numbers off, say if you have 17 people, maybe number off to 22. So the 22nd person has to replace any of the numbers with a word. Then you go around again and again using the word in place of the number and then whoever is the 22nd person the next time replaces another number with a word. So you keep going like this until all the numbers are filled with words. It's hard because you have to remember all the words that have been made into words. Usually this game is not too hard for my students because I mainly teach the higher level people. But I guess a lot of the people at this party were pretty low level so it was hard for them. The game was just not as fun as it could have been because everyone was helping each other. Usually when you play this game, you're drinking and if you can't think of the word, you have to drink. But of course since these people were all lame and weren't drinking, it wasn't as cool as it could have been. They seemed to think it was fun though. So anyway, here's a picture from that night:



We have the day off tomorrow because it's a national holiday, Culture Day. I'm not really sure what people are supposed to do on this day, so I'm going to the Nagoya Aquarium. It's supposed to be pretty cool. So I'll put some pictures up of the aquarium if I actually go.
***Oh ya, and a shout out goes out to my UNCLE MARIO! How's it going? Is your little toe still trying to get on top of the other one?