Homestay (or in Japanese Hōmusutei)

Day One

My friend and I were very lucky to get the opportunity to stay with a host family though our course at Okayama university.

We were picked up at 10am by the host father who had his two adorable daughters (aged 4 and 7) with him to meet us too. They were incredibly shy at first, and the eldest handed us each a paper crane she had made with our names on. We were then taken back to their lovely house, and met our host mother. The children were pretty eager to get all their toys out and show them to us, and almost immediately I ended up making a puzzle with the 4 year old.

When the kids were eventually persuaded to put their toys away our host family offered to drive us to the mall in Kurashiki (Aeon Mall), one that we had not managed to go to ourselves in the past as we had not mastered the public transport yet. 

Once there we were left to our own devices, so decided to try our first Japanese 'Chinese' food, which was pretty delicious to be honest! And have since been back to this particular restaurant.

It turned out that this mall was a lot bigger than either of us had expected, and we both ended up spending far more money than we planned to, getting a little lost, and we never even found half the shops on this occasion! However, we did find a Studio Ghibli shop :D which we were very excited about, though it was incredibly expensive! 

For those who do not know, Studio Ghibli is the Japanese equivalent of Disney, and well worth checking out.

 

 Who thought this was a good name for a baby clothing store?!?

Well that is one way to make a mannequin wink... Just paint over her eye and add fake lashes, that won't be creepy at all! 

We bought some doughnuts for the kids :) 

After all that hard shopping we met up again with our host family, who took us on a few errands, which was weirdly nice because we really felt like part of the family just going food shopping, something you can really miss when studying abroad. 

We then went out to dinner at their favourite family restaurant, and I was curious to see that the 4 year old was given scissors to cut her noodles, something I had never considered before. Then it was back home for a game of Jenga, which I had bought earlier in the day, and the family had never played before! I was honestly very impressed with how tall the tower got, especially for beginners. 

Then came bath time...

Our host mother told us to gather our bath stuff (towels, soap etc), plus our pyjamas, and then we all bundled into the car. We were taken to the Onsen, public baths, that luckily her parents (our host grandparents?) owned and ran. Naturally my friend and I were a little nervous as public baths are pretty much like having a bath with strangers, without any swimming costumes... Eventually we built up our courage and went for it. Funnily enough the two little girls ended up have to try and explain or show me what to do, but ultimately the experience as a whole was surprisingly enjoyable. After bathing we dried off, got into our pyjamas and went out to the lobby when the owners were. Usually you buy a milkshake or something similar afterwards and just relax for a bit, but we got them for free, wooo! We had a lovely chat with the grandparents, in a mixture of English and Japanese, and promised to go back there at some point. Then it was home and bed time. 

Day Two

Started the day with a home cooked breakfast, and then we went to the local museum to look at a traditional Japanese pottery exhibition, whilst our host mother straightened the house. 

When we got back they offered to take us all to the beach, which I was super excited about. We drove up into the mountains and stopped for ice cream at a lovely little ice cream shop. It had some quirky flavours and of course I couldn't resist trying them, so I had kiwi ice cream and olive ice cream, which was actually pretty tasty! It was interesting to see that this place was clearly a hang out spot for Japanese bikers, and almost hilarious to see a huge group of hard looking people in leathers, sitting around eating ice cream.

Then the views:

Here we are with the girls before we drove back home and said our goodbyes.

(The little one didn't take that pikachu hat off for two days!) 

All in all it was an amazing experience, I am really glad we had the opportunity to do it, and I learnt a lot about Japanese life and families just from those two days. Plus the two little girls were excellent Japanese teachers for me, probably because we were on the same wave length.

A weekend in Kyoto

I had been putting off this post because I had taken a ridiculous amount of photos, which meant a lot of sorting and deleting was needed. That aside, let me first say that I officially love Kyoto, and it is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful places in the world. If you ever visit Japan, Kyoto is the place to go for stunning sights, more so than Tokyo! 

The trip itself had been organised by a couple of people from the language cafe where I sometimes work, and they did a pretty amazing job considering the size of our group.

First stop Kiyomizu Temple

It was a lovely sunny day, which was surprising considering it was the middle of autumn. However, this did make taking pictures a little difficult at times.

It was near impossible to capture the colour of the trees properly, so you shall have to take my word for it when I say they were stunning! 

Oh look, it is me on a bridge looking photoshopped in.

If you look carefully you can see the castle in the distance. It is such a shame that these views were disrupted by the building works, but on places as old as these, constant restoration is fairly inevitable.

In this picture you can see where the waterfall ended, trickling into the pool below. 

There was a ridiculously long line of tourists (mostly Japanese, as always), queueing up to wash their hands and faces in the clean mountain water.

Better show the scale of the building works, and how high up this wooden structure stood! 

With the amazing views behind you, people took it in turns to light an incense stick and place it within this huge bowl. As I understand it, it is believed that the smoke created is cleansing both for the body and spirit, so each person who went up would waft the smoke over them. I saw some people some would bring their hands together and others muttered words I did not know, but each person was different with their own individual rituals.

Next I tried my hand at the Japanese equivalent of fortunetelling. You hand over 200 en to the woman behind the counter, and she gives you this wooden box (left). I gave it a confused shake, hearing things rattling around inside, until a single stick fell out of a small hole at the bottom. On the stick was a number (in my case 55), which related to the pieces of paper you should see in the background. On the paper she handed over was a lot of writing and so my Japanese friend had to translate for me, but overall mine was pretty good :D

The sign reads:

Love stone. 
This stone is called "Love-fortune-telling" stone. If you walk safely from this stone to the other with your eyes closed, for once, your wish'll be granted soon. If you can't, it will be long before your love is realised. And it is said talking advice requires you to have someone who'll help you achieve your love.

I didn't give it a go as it was quite busy and I had no desire to go blindly crashing into Japanese strangers on my pursuit for love.

None of my pictures can come even close to capturing the breathtaking landscapes. But I loved this view, with the trees in full autumn colours, and with Kyoto city (which had previously been the capital of Japan) below, and the mountains forever in the background, it was just beautiful! 

There is not a single nail used in the entire structure of the Kiyomizu temple, and hopefully with the picture below you can get an idea of the scale of it. 

As you can see there is quite a long drop from where the tourists are (on the stage) to the ground below.

Apparently there is a popular expression "to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu" which is the Japanese equivalent of the English expression "to take the plunge". This refers to an Edo period tradition that held that, if one were to survive a 13m jump from the stage, one's wish would be granted. Two hundred thirty-four jumps were recorded in the Edo period and, of those, 85.4% survived. However, the practise is now prohibited.

More pretty pictures of trees...

Ginkaku Temple

It was originally intended that Ginkaku-ji would later be covered in silver foil, (Gin being silver in Japanese), however the plans took so long that the plan was never realised before the creators (Yoshimasa) death. Instead it was decided to maintain the "unfinished" appearance, how Yoshimasa last saw it.

These perfectly maintained sand gardens are very well known, and I found it incredibly hard to resist running though them! 

Views down onto the gardens

It felt like being in a film walking through these trees ...

Off to the nights entertainments

Afterwards we headed to a place where tourists went literally just to look at trees, at this stage I had probably had enough of leafs for one day...

This menu confused me for far too long, until someone helpfully pointed out that the bar was called 'WAS'.

Day Number Two

I remain forever fascinated by Japanese buses. The driver handles no money at all, everyone simply queues up with the correct change and tips it into the device here when leaving the bus. 

If you do not have the correct exact amount, you place you coins in another machine which gives you smaller coin denominations, so that you can pay the exact amount.

Simple right?

Kinkaku Temple

Temple of the Golden Pavilion

I tried my hand at a panoramic shot, you can see in the pond a number of islands (ten in total), the largest of which representing the Japanese islands.

"The zen typology is seen through the rock composition, the bridges, and plants are all arranged in a specific way so as to represent famous places in Chinese and Japanese literature."

The Japanese love their waterfalls, no matter how small

Almost everyone who walked by tried their hand at throwing coins into the pot you can see. Very few succeeded! I wasn't entirely sure the of the reasoning behind it, but I had a go anyway, inevitably failing.

Extremely useful instructions! I think I scared the poor girl in the next cubicle when she heard my cameras shutter sound go off

More cleansing incense sticks and smoke wafting. The woman on the right apologised for being in my photo though 

Arashiyama

(shopping)

I think by this stage I was tired of taking photos, so all you get is a vending machine essentially just selling sushi shaped rubbers.

And my two cute little Octopus, Pako and Kopako the takos :) 

Thanks for reading this super long blog!!