Sweet Disposition, She's Got You High Vagabond

Another COSMO event! 

Sunday we went to Fushimi-inari jinjya (伏見稲荷神社) and the Gekkeikan Okura Sake Museum.  Both were amazing! 

When they first mentioned Fushimi-inari, I didn't realize that it was the jinjya with all the torii.  It's a HUGE place.  When you first get off the train, it just looks like a little town.  It's pretty touristy because of the jinjya, but if you overlooked that stuff, it has the feel of a small town.  It was more towards the southern hills, so it felt a little rural. 

 

I really like going into the hills.  

I think the jinjya is meant to bring good harvests.  There were lots of fox statues around with grain in their mouths.  They made me think of the jackals usually seen in Greek mythology.

Once you get past the main shrine where you make your offering and pray, there are thousands of torii lining the way up the mountain.  At one point you reach this nice little pond.  It's a little murky, but it's a nice little respite.  I'd really like to come back to this temple in the morning in the winter.  If it snows, I bet this place will be amazing.

There were more places to stop along the hike.  One of them had Ice Cream.  It was super good! The mix was vanilla and some kind of rice flour.  Sounds weird, but it was delicious. 

Eventually we went back down and moved on to the sake museum.  It was quite entertaining.  Noah did a candid translation of the old woman's explanation of how they make sake. Apparently Fushimi is a traditional sake-brewing district and one of Kyoto's top 100 scenic areas.  It was quite beautiful.

  

After our little tour of the sake museum they let us do some taste-tests.  We got a 40 year old sake, a newer sake, and a plum dessert wine.  They were all pretty good.  The two regular sakes had a really mild flavor.  I quite liked them.  The plum wine was a less-sweet form of ume-shu.  I'm sure it'd go wonderfully with a tart of some kind.  Maybe pear... AH! FUTURE PLANS! So gonna do that when I get the chance.

We left with small bottles of sake.  They were free omiyage! Most people drank their bottles at the river (that's all the rage here, drinking by the Kamagawa River-- it's called Kamanomi 「鴨飲み」).  I saved mine for some other time. 

We also went to a kaitenzushi place called Kappa Sushi (カッパ寿司).  It hit the spot.  We were all starving by that point.  I ate 8 plates.  I had some tempura sushi, takoyaki, salmon sushi with mayo and onion and avocado, and other scrumpcious morsels.

  

It was a long day, but super fun.  

I also made a new friend! His name is Kohsuke Fukushima.  He studied abroad at UC Santa Cruz a couple of years ago.  His English is ridiculously good.  He makes Jen and I endlessly jealous.  We wish we could be as fluent in Japanese as he is in English.  それじゃ、もっと勉強しなくちゃならない！

That's all I've got for now I think...  

Oh! Since Halloween is coming I made some decorations for my room.  I had to do something.  And as per mother's request, here's some photos of my rice cooker.  I've got it pretty much figured out.  Now I can get those box meals that you can just dump in with some rice and they cook with the rice.  

When the rice is done, you've got an awesome meal!

mmm... Speaking of food, it's dinner time for me.  

Love until later,

Caitlin D.

Yatai-Bayashi

Taiko. That's right. I played taiko today. 

So my connection came through! I get to play taiko for free once a week... as long as I lie and say that I'm in AKP. 

They meet in Uji, which is about a 20 minute train ride from Kyoto -eki, at a Cultural center.  They have quite a few drums- maybe 10 chu-daiko and equally as many shime!  They warmed up playing drum-rolls on beta-chu and slowly speeding up.  

Then we started with a song.  I picked that on up pretty quickly. One of the women was really helpful.  She showed me the patterns.  It was cool! You play in groups of 3 on one drum and rotate out.  You start with each person playing it through by themselves, then you switch with each pattern, then you all come together and play it on one drum at once.  It was super fun. They work a lot more with vocalizations and have a much looser style than I'm used to.  

After that song, we went into a miyake style song.  I watched it as the senior members played it through a couple of times, then gave it a try.  They taught the first portion last week, so I had to catch up a bit.  I still don't have it down very well.  That's alright though because they gave me written music for all of the songs we played.  I'll be studying in my room (sorry person below me, you'll hear some banging coming from your ceiling).  

Miyake is still a little awkward for me.  I wish I had the mirrors in the barn to see if I'm doing it at all correctly.  

Speaking of correctly... I did the same thing I always do with swing-ji.  I reversed the hands.  When the sensei  came around he's like "Hantai!" and I couldn't figure out what I needed to do opposite.  Then I realized my hands were backwards.  Anthony gets the problem.  It took me so long to get swing-ji right for Kappa Jam!

Anyway, back to the practice.  After that song we played another beta-chu song.  It was cool.  

Kimiko, my new friend from Wellsley on AKP, and I had no clue what we were doing, but we gave it our best.  It was super fun!  

The last song we played was yatai.  It's a little repetitive, but I really like yatai-style.  It's a good core workout.  

It was an interesting evening and it's reminded me how much I missed having taiko.  Chatting with 

Kimiko made me realize how fortunate I was to have such an established group back home.  The Wellsley group is a lot like Claremont, they have a problem keeping the group alive.  The person that had formal training graduated last year.  They don't have many drums either.  I hope for their sake the East Coast ITC plan goes through.  She'd heard about Invitationals and was super jealous.  I want to share all I know with her and I want to learn everything she knows as well.  We're already comparing our versions of Matsuri.  We've got plans to go early next Wednesday and make laundry-basket drums to play on together.  

We asked if we could come early and just use their drums, but apparently the cultural center has a lot going on most days, so the noise is a limiting factor.

So there you have it.  I've got taiko! Woot!

Oh! While I was waiting for the group at Kyoto-eki, this woman comes and sits next to me and starts talking to me in English.  Her name was Misako.  She was 63 years old and had taught herself English.  She was really cute and friendly.  Apparently she did this a lot because she had several notebooks filled with messages from people all over the world.  Some of them were thank you messages, others just read "Misako, your English is excellent!"  It was really random and really fun.  She made me an origami crane.  I'm going to hang it in my room.  

That's all I've got for now.

Love until later,

Caitlin D.

Father, Son, Life and Death

I promised I'd update, so I will.  Unfortunately there's nothing on the taiko front just yet.  My contact messaged me about 30 mins before I was going to leave telling me that it got pushed back to Thursday night.  So I'll update on that tomorrow night.

On that note, Agard has kindly offered to meet with me on weekends so I can still go to taiko! Otherwise I would have probably dropped the class.  This is the only taiko I've found, and that class is at the same time.  Fortunately it's not an issue!

Agard also brought me the rice cooker today.  I had a delicious dinner of bananas on rice.  It was super good.  Apparently Anthony had it when he was a kid.  Thought I'd give it a shot.  

I've been a bit homesick lately.  It only seems to be when I'm around people, though.  That's a little sad.  Whenever it's just me going about my business on my own I'm happy as a clam.  I've been particularly enjoying listening to music while biking home from school.  It makes me feel truly blessed to be where I am.  

Love until later,

Caitlin D.

Brightly Wound

Well it was an eventful weekend.  Karaoke Friday night, refrigerator Saturday afternoon, and a Costco trip Sunday.  

I'm so happy! I've replaced my poor broken hard drive.  I'm not sure how to dispose of the body though... 

Anyway, I found a 1 TB western digital at Costco for ¥9400.  I think that's a good price, but I could be wrong.  Either way, I now have a wonderful 900-something Gigs of space to fill up with whatever I want.  I'm going crazy with Luelinks.  

Also, I heard that the Avatar movie was massacred.  I wasn't expecting much after hearing M. Night Shyamalan was directing, but I was holding out hope.  Jen told me the whole fire nation is Indian actors.  I have nothing against the people of India, but the fire nation is Chinese.  Also, the water tribe is not caucasian.  They're Inuit.  Seriously.  The casting is rather upsetting. The last shred of hope I have for this movie is the sets.  They seem to be pretty detailed.  I am curious to see how they'll do Appa... and if they'll even include Momo. 

Bah! Whatever. 

I'll post again on Wednesday or Thursday to let you all know how taiko went.

Love until later,

Caitlin D.

Lovebug

Again, I apologize for the wait. I know you all wait for these posts with bated breath... not. My delinquency with these posts has been brought to my attention and addressed appropriately (I wrote a post-it in RED PERMANENT MARKER!  It is not to be ignored).  So let's see what's happened most recently...

Classes have begun.  I've got a lovely schedule. I was previously registered for a ridiculous amount of courses, but I decided not to stress myself out too much.  I'm going to study independently in addition to classes, so come the spring placement test I can jump up a level. If you make it into level V, they allow you to take normal university classes!  Though, I hear there's a ton of paperwork...

Anyway, here's a picture of my happy little schedule.

We actually had a day off because of typhoon 18 this last week.  It was kind of nice.  The weather was really cool to watch.  I just sat at my window watching the cars pass and the clouds change.

My room is coming together quite nicely now.  I picked up a refrigerator yesterday!  It was only ¥7400 including delivery.  It's a nice size.  Comes up to about my waist and fits all I need.  I'm very pleased.  God love the recycled student goods shop!

Also I've found taiko!!! I'm so excited about it! A girl I met through COSMOPOLITAN (this wonderful circle that takes exchange students to do cool things around Kyoto) who's with AKP (Associated Kyoto Program).  She's from Boston.  She told me that they have a taiko opportunity set up for them.  She invited me to come and play with them every Wednesday night from 7-9pm.  I can't wait.  I can't freaking wait.  There are no words for how happy I am about this.  It's a little far, a ¥250 train ride each way, but it's totally worth it.  Once a week isn't that bad.

Last night I did karaoke for the first time! It was awesome.  My first song was Lovebug.  Jonas Brothers are meh, but I really love singing that song.  I'll definitely be going back. 

After karaoke Lilly stayed the night.  In the morning we ate breakfast like hobos.  Jen made 5 scrambled eggs and we had peanut butter bread and ate it on a cardboard box on the floor.  It was awesome.

All in all I'm starting to settle into life here.  I'm happy.  Jen and I have been talking about what it's going to be like going back to the states.  We think we'll have bad konbini withdrawals and it will feel weird when we're not thanked for our business profusely before leaving every shop.  I could see a life here.  I think I'd like to come back here after I graduate. Definitely something to think on.  

Though, the same thing that draws me back home now will still matter then-- family and friends.