Waking up. So waking up at 7:00 every morning isn't as fun as it sounds. I know, surprise, right? But it's getting kind of old. Especially for a college kid who is used to rolling out of bed 15 minutes before class and then rolling into jeans she's been wearing for the past week, brushing her teeth and biking to class. Yeah, waking up 2 hours before getting to school to have time to eat breakfast and take an hour commute is not exactly my cup of tea. I'm getting used to it, but it could use a little honey to sweeten the deal.
I feel like something happened in class, oh yeah, in our Japanese class, we had some bonafide Japanese people come talk to us. Our class of five students broke into two groups to chat it up with two Nihonjin per group. That was interesting. The going was a bit slow and there were of course awkward pauses, but all in all pretty good. We mostly talked about Japanese culture and being a student and interesting stuff like that.
Today is also my weekly 3 hour class, which would have normally sucked but today we had a field trip to Fushimi Inari shrine. Yay! A little outside of Kyoto, Fushimi Inari shrine is dedicated to the Kami (deity) Inari and her many incarnations. The actual shrine and pilgrimage site according to our professor is actually the entire mountain and there are 3 peaks with various sub shrines where people go to pray and make offerings. You may know this shrine as that place in Memoirs of a Geisha with all the Tori.
Needless to say, it was gorgeous. The weather was perfect for an uphill climb up a mountain, a bit too cold for my typical taste but your body warms up once you start moving and we were moving a lot. Also, the colors were great. The orange (red? People keep telling me it's red, but all I see is orange) against the green was a nice contrast between warm and cold colors all in all very pretty. Apparently there is a giant waterfall there, but we didn't have time to check it out. I'm a fan of waterfalls, but I'm okay with that because we went to an even better place afterwards.
Afterwards was an SCTI program sponsored Farewell/Welcome dinner party at Kyoto Tower Hotel. Farwell, because some programs are coming to an end, Welcome because our program is just beginning. What's better than a tori covered mountain shrine? A fancy schmancy hotel with and endless supply of free food and delicious desserts. Yum. Yum. Yum. We were of course the large obnoxious American group, but really that doesn't matter. The food was awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I was giddy at the site of the dessert buffet. It was beautiful. Practically brought tears to my eyes.
The only terrible part of the entire thing was getting out of that hotel. Apparently, some of the elevators stop going to the floor we were on after 9 PM. Yeah, that would be the time we finished. Two elevators still served our floor, but there were lots and lots of people waiting to go down, so our group tried to be clever and use the stairs, which was pretty difficult. The stairs were near impossible to find. If there is a fire in that hotel everyone above the first floor is going to die, I'm not even joking. But we managed to make it to the sixth floor, caught the elevator from there and freed ourselves from the clutches of the Tokyo Tower Hotel.
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