So I currently have two unfinished entries sitting in my drafts folder. One goes over the days I had forgotten to blog about in between other events, and the other is about meeting my home visit family. I feel like I keep putting off writing about things happening recently since there is still so much I haven’t wrote about yet. In order to keep things going I think I’m going to have to skip over what has been going on before this. To be honest, time has flown by here. It’s hard to explain what time feels like here but I know that my friends feel the same way. I feel like I’ve been here for a year when it has really only been a little less than two months. The unfortunate thing is that I feel like I haven’t been able to do anything that I wanted to do. I really haven’t travelled all that much outside of the Kansai area. Granted, I have to been to both Osaka and Kyoto a lot. But there is still stuff in both cities I haven’t done yet.
I’m hoping to find time to do at least some of the things I set out to do before coming to Japan. At the very least I want to be able to visit Tokyo and Hiroshima. It’s all in the planning I suppose.
Today a few of us went out to Nara after classes. Nara is a lot smaller than both Kyoto and Osaka. We did a lot of walking around and visited different places. The most well known place there is the Todaiji Temple. We didn’t get to walk up the main steps because there was supposed to be a big televised concert there the next day and they had already set up a stage. It was a bit out of place considering it’s a big Buddist temple. But we still got to take pictures and see most of the temple. After walking around for a while it started to rain and pretty much killed most of the plan to explore the city. But I still was able to take some nice pictures. The train ride there took a long time, but we actually went through the mountains and it made for a scenic ride. I shamelessly took a few videos of the train ride while getting glares from Tim. It’s considered rude to take photos, talk, or do anything that makes noise at all while riding trains and buses here. But there are always the odd japanese people who don’t abide by this. For the most part we keep to this expectation as well. But I won’t lie, there are times in which we don’t.
This weekend is another long weekend for us since Monday is a holiday. The plan was to go to Hiroshima this weekend but money and time constraints made it impossible. I have a speech to give and an in-class writing composition test on Tuesday so it may have been a good idea to stick around good old Hirakata for the weekend.
As for the two other entries I’m going to try to finish them up and get them posted here. Either that or just combine them.
Dana in Japan 