I blame a large portion of the ultimate outcome of the situation on the school system here at I.C.U., which I will describe briefly. I.C.U. has quite possibly the most ineffective class registration system of any school I have attended. You basically have one day where you get up, go to campus, register for courses in a computer lab, print out a tenative schedule, take that to your advisor, get counseling and a signature, and then turn that in. This part is well enough, although I can’t for the life of me understand why they think everyone should get counseling on the same day, more, the day that everyone has a 3PM deadline to register for? It just creates a mass headache as people queue outside of the faculty offices, waiting for their turn.

My real beef, however, comes with how the courses themselves are set up. There is a three day add-drop period. THREE DAYS. Some classes don’t even MEET in the first three days, so you are immediately locked in beyond control. In addition to that, they don’t have any withdrawal or incomplete system. If something horrible happens to you personally, you are pretty much left on your own, do the work or fail. Teachers can’t even give you an incomplete in order to accomodate circumstances. What is more, say you get thrown in a position where you take a failing grade because of inability to sit the required days (failure due to abscence), they won’t even allow you to continue to sit in that class, even though you are still registered and are receiving an F in that class. So, say, take a class like Japanese, here referred to as “JLP”, if you fail due to something like personal circumstances preventing you from attending class for so many days, they won’t even allow you to continue attending the course to learn in your time here. Apparently it isn’t worth their time?

I know personally I am here to grow as a person and advance my Japanese studies. More than receiving a grade, what is important to me is learning as much as I can through my experiences unique to my time abroad. Even if I cannot earn credit in my JLP anymore, I would still like to sit the class and through much personal study on my own, get what I am paying for, and continue to learn and progess as a Japanese student. But because of this system, I am not left to my own devices. My only real benefit being my living arrangement with a host family.

All in all, I think the system is completely flawed and ineffective. I have had friends have to deal with other problems at their respective universities and I think all in all, it is worth noting that while you are studying abroad, pay very special attention to their policies, as they are going to differ from your host universities most likely in some surprising ways. Everything was going swimmingly up until a few weeks ago, where it all slipped out of control. And now I am left on my own to pick up the pieces, my university pretty much turning their back. Oh well, can’t win them all I suppose.

sometimes I just wish I could return and fade into that oblivion where no one would ever ask me “how americans dress.” I don’t mean to sound rude or ungrateful, but I swear I am going to explode from stupid-people syndrome in a minute.

I was biking home and some guy came walking RIGHT at me. The sidewalk is really narrow on both sides and it is a bus street, so you can’t just exactly drop onto the street, unless you want to get flattened by a bus. Anyways, so the sideway is maybe two/three feet wide. So generally when you ride your bike down it and people are walking they step off the curve, let you ride by, and get back on. This is right around the corner from where I have been living for months, so I figured this guy would step onto the street and let me pass. Wrong. The guy comes right at me as I slow, jumps back, like he is startled, and then walks up to me and starts screaming in my face. I’m not sure what language he was speaking, it didn’t sound like Japanese but I was listening to headphones. Every bone in my body wanted to turn around and go give him some choice words. Seriously, what is wrong with people like that? It wasn’t like I was riding a million miles and hour and was going to run him over….no, it was because I’m a stupid foreigner riding a bike and that means I have no idea what I am doing and I am second rate to almost everyone else who uses the dang sidewalk right outside my house.

whatever

so then I get home and my mother is all surprised because apparently I look good today and engages me in conversation on what I think it means to dress up. She then starts to talk about Europeans in contrast to Americans, apparently Americans don’t dress up, blah blah blah, t-shirts and jeans, blah blah blah, Vincent wears jeans a lot blah blah blah

I just turned my mind off and bit my tongue.

I mean, the woman JUST WATCHED the Devil Wears Prada and now she is asking me if Americans all walk around in t-shirts and jeans to special events. And if students never wear suits to school.

I want to not get irritated and explain that YES, in America people dress nicely for ocsasions and yes, students wear suits to school when the occasion calls for it, but I just finish my dinner and run to my sweet sweet room.

And thus the battle begins once more…..while on abroad you ARE your respective country and regardless of how you feel about it people are going to ask you about your culture, your home, your goverment, all those things you might not know or even care about. And it is going to make you irritated most likely. I knew that coming to Japan but it doesn’t make it any easier sometimes.

In the Fall I did a lot to try and foster relationship building with my two host parents. I would stay in at least a day or two a week, usually Sunday, and watch movies on television with them. I would always be home for supper, make sure to send the proper e-mails, and happily engage them in conversation. For whatever reasons, I’m not quite sure, more or less I now find myself out all the time, not eating at the house, and half arsed to open my mouth when I am being asked questions of. The problem lays in the fact that because of some rather nasty personal situations, which are not appropiate to write about being private in nature to my host family, my host mother and host father are very rarely home anymore. I find myself stranded for dinner, alone in the house for entire stretches of days. While that may sound like a nice break from reality, fact remains that often night begins to descend without any notification from my family, I am left to deviate from Plan A, that is, wait like a dependent pet on master to come home and fix me my meal, by going out and eating. That is a nice change every now and then, but it is *expensive*. Part of the reason why I was eager to sign up for exchange with a host family is for the hefty price tag. Read: meals included. I would rather have people cook me home made food rather than end up at McDonalds four times a week like my friends in dorms. Fact of the matter is, there isn’t a lot of very convenient places to eat around here that are healthy. You are left to do it yourself or end up getting greasy fast food.

So it becomes this cycle. My host family is gone, I wait around, then jet, they come back eventually, only I am gone. So because no one is around I find myself feeling the need to leave more often. Who wants to sit around an empty house all day? But because they don’t really understand I stay home quite a bit, they think I am thus out all the time and thus don’t feel quite so bad to have to strand me all alone for long periods of time.

We just are not synching. These things happen. I am sure once I head back to class our schedules will start to match back up, we will start eating dinner regularly together, and things will generally improve, but this past month has a been a very expensive and odd vacation.

The benefits of living in a home stay are wide and varied, although, as comical as it may seem, I hadn’t even seen the second floor of my house until a month ago, when I went upstairs out of curiosity while no one was home. I mean, I have lived in this house since September and I hadn’t even seen the second floor until March, how bizarre is that? I didn’t want to go up, although the thought had crossed my mind many times, but I eventually just kind of lost it one day and the curiosity killed this cat. In a way, now that I think of it, the entire experience, small and trivial, is a kind of symbol for the entire home stay experience. Here you are, living in a house. You think you know the house fairly well, sharing every amneity and nook and cranny. However, there is an entire second floor to the house that you can’t even begin to fathom as it is guarded and private. My host family, while letting me into their home and into their hearts, still holds a piece of themselves, and that second floor physical space, as private, as their’s only, and off limits to all the students they invite into their home. That is natural of course. They have new students living in their house, year after year after year. But at the same time, I feel that is an experience which has kind of jaded and cheapened the entire routine. My host family from Hokkaido, they had only had one host student before I had arrived, and their house was probably half the size of this house, but from the day I walked into their house, their lives, they opened up every tiny nook and cranny to share with me. Their son would even run out of the shower, naked as the day he was born, and do all manners of hilarous exercises right in the room in front of me while I was doing my homework. No shame, no guilt. They took me to the onsen the day they met me, we all dropped our clothes, and with that, even, I think many of our initial inhibitions. And though my time was short with them, I feel an immense attraction to their family, a very special and warm memory of the summer I shared with them. Whereas, as of late, the way I view my home in Tokyo is as a house, usually an empty one, that I come back to when I want to be alone.

Rather depressing, I suppose. But I feel both experiences highlight two very different types of homestays and both of which are part of the gamble you take when you enroll in the program. You could draw one, you could draw the other. You could even draw a horrible homestay (because my homestay in Tokyo is very enjoyable, don’t get me wrong, it is *far* from undesirable). So before anyone takes the plunge I think it is important to consider all these things in equal accordance.

I have had a lot of things go on over the past month, it is really quite outside the point to really go into any depth but I will say that school ended, I am on break, I am scheduled to go on vacation in two days, and I had a wonderful birthday.

This blog was created first and foremost to reach potential students who are considering the possibility of studying abroad in Japan. I don’t know how many I have reached, but to that ends I shall try and maintain it, since I have failed more or less thus far, hahah.

Having lived with a host family for almost six months, I have to say that while a balance is located, tension still remains. I think this is primarily due to whether one focuses on life in or outside the house, and how they interact with their family. I have a very positive relationship with my family but I think they sometimes feel like I lie to them. A perfect example would today. My other asked if the nikuman she served me yesterday were good. I said yes and then remembered I had thrown half of it away because I wasn’t hungry and she had just served them to me in my room.

While I very much appreciate the effort, being American, I eat when I am hungry and don’t ask for food when I don’t want it. Here, I so often have food put in front of me and I find myself dreading meal times, thinking of the tangiable gauntlet I will have to run every day. While sometimes it is very nice and I sit down to a wondrous feast, I also find myself in situations where, lacking any sense of appetite, I find myself being poked and proded to eat. My eating habits are an anomaly in the States, let alone abroad.

Of course it will all depend on the environment in which you are living. Students in dorms tend to eat a lot of crap food. There is a 24 hour McDonalds 5 minutes away from our dorm, so you can imagine how often we find ourselves eating McDonalds at 3am in the morning.

This isn’t going anywhere, so once I think about more pertinent topics I will update again!

I have no idea why this blog gets updated when I have so much free time. Or rather, I suppose I don’t have actually have a lot of free time, I just don’t do any of my work. Next week is my last week of the term and I have a large test on every day in Japanese. Seriously. Why? Why do this do this every term? I have a chapter test on monday, a large project that was assigned this week due on tuesday, movie and sakubun tests on wednesday, interview on thursday, and then the final exam itself on Friday. I guess I should be happy a week from today I will be completely done, right? Right? Well, seeing as I am free for now and no one wants to do ANYTHING I am expecting I really long and depressing break. Whenever I try and get people up and out they are always like oh we can’t but then plans always get made and stuff gets done and it generally doesn’t involve me. I stopped really thinking about it or caring about it too much, and I don’t know if people do it consciously or not, but people get so offended if I ever bring it up, so I just don’t, and don’t really think about it

except when I’m alone, like now.

We had to do group projects in my Intercultural Communication course and one group did a website on how to spend your free time at ICU. I probably should have read it. Goodness I am tired. What else, what else……

I don’t much to say, but I suppose I am going to update this at least every other day to get back in the habit. So if anyone is even actually reading this, keep with me~

okay, so I have recently gotten into a relationship, I want to say it has been almost two months. Dating while abroad is a very tricky thing. You could be like me, and skip class three days in a row. You could also pay five dollars one way every time you need to get their apartment. You could also turn up trips to go to Kyoto and other parts of Japan. But as much as things like that suck, no one is making you do them, you do them because you honestly would RATHER be with that person. I came to Japan to see Japan and I really couldn’t ever foresee myself falling into anything like this. It is a bilingual relationship, neither of us is completely fluent in the native language of our partner, although it tends to flow like this, english in conversation/person, japanese in emails and writing. I am not quite sure why. I think I am a little more insecure about speaking, that would be why.

It does have its wonderful perks. I mean, if your going to study a language and a culture, what could possibly beat dating while abroad? You get an insider’s look into the life and culture of day to day Japanese life. At the same time, relationships, like mentioned, do take up a lot of time and there are sacrifices that go along with it.

The more tricky line to walk across is the host family relationship line. If your a boy and are dating a girl, I don’t see too many problems. If your a girl, there is no way they are going to let you not come home weekend after weekend. If your a boy and you like boys, get prepared to come up with elaborate stories on the spot. If your a girl who likes girls, I don’t even know what to say, haha. My parents know I don’t come home on weekends, they know I skip dinner and say I am out and doing things, I watch that part of or relationship deteriorate. I think I could have been very very close to my host family. But once I started dating someone my focus changed and although my host family and I do not have any problems or resentment towards one another, there is a kind of more hands-off approach being dealt now. They don’t treat me like a kid, they treat me like an adult, which is nice, so I have my own decisions to make, and I have to deal with the consequences. Like…..not going to class for three days in a row this week and now having to sit down and teach myself an entire chapter. Oh well…..

But the experiences I have had and the memories I have made are worth it.

The other danger of dating while abroad is the whole time frame. What do you really do when your time is up? That is not something I really want to think about but I know in six months from now it will probably be a problem if we are still together.

But you can’t really do much but try your best, I suppose. There are going to be language, cultural, personal conflicts, but its something that is worth it in the end, I think, moreso than running around by myself and studying the language, really interacting with people on a very personal level. So I guess in the end it is really up to everyone’s own individual goals while abroad.

But yet I still have a massive head ache.

Christmas break has been kind of bittersweet. Now that I’m in a fairly serious relationship most of my free time is spent with my partner and that impededs the study abroad experience. I would not trade it for the world but dating while studying abroad, especially if living with a host family, is going to really cause problems unless you are like me and can make up random lies over breakfast, four hours late, talking about how you got drunk in Kabuki-chou. Thank goodness for the Japanese attitude towards sex and alcohol, it makes it SO much easier. Sure, some people get screwed up and come home late, I spent the night over my boyfriend’s and come home late and then PRETEND I got fucked up to cover. One of these days I’m just going to tell them and see what happens. That might be a horrendous idea. But considering my host mother made me rent Brokeback Mountain and then tried to convince me they weren’t gay but “really close friends” for a whole day says enough on its own. Oh Japan and your whacky ideas of homosexuality, or rather, lack of ideas about “homosexuality” since it all gets categorized as “遊び” or rather, play, that which you screw around with on the side, but everyone goes homes to their wives and it is all okay in rainbow sunshine WWII never happened land. Someone told me the other day Japan has still never issued a peace treaty with Russia, on both sides, Russia hasn’t either, so technically the two countries are still at war, XD.

Okay, back to reality, my headache is mostly gone, thanks to a really awesome dinner. We had spaghetti, XD, followed by this special New Year’s food called um 七草粥、nanakusagayu, or seven herb rice porridge

http://blue_moon.typepad.com/blue_lotus/2005/01/o107_dinner_nan.html

It is eaten on January 7th and is extremely healthy (and tasty!)

I guess that is the one traditional New Year’s thing I did this year considering I was never home. My host family wanted to really have me experience Japanese New Year but I was so busy running around. I did go to Meiji Jingu on New Year’s Eve and bought some お礼 for my host family and their new-born grandchild. I thought that was pretty badass, all the shrines staying open all night on New Years, trains running all night, and everyone kind of goes out and bum rushes them during midnight. If we had gone to Meiji Jingu on New Year’s at midnight it would have probably been ridiculous

this has nothing to do with Japan but for some reason I’ve been watching clips of Jesus Camp online. I like documentary but I honestly can’t tell if the movie is unbiased and edited to have that effect or really that disturbing. Oh well….

1. Compared to America, Christmas here is a lot more laid back in the sense you can actually still do your shopping the day before (or even ON Christmas), but don’t let that happen to you, as it did to me. I think I did all my shopping in one day, just hopped the subway to Asakusa and went nuts.

2. Reserve Reserve Reserve. If you want to go out and have a nice dinner or get a large nice Christmas cake, make sure you look into it weeks in advance because places fill up *fast* and the week of is going to be too late. I had friends who wanted to go ice skating following by dinner but I think had to resort to buying themself food at some cheap restaurant somewhere. They sell small Christmas cakes EVERYWHERE, I mean EVERYWHERE, you could be in the middle of nowhere and there would be a vending machine and a Christmas cake table set up most likely, but if you want a large elaborate cake you have to put in a special reservation ahead of time.

Just some of my random observations about Christmas….the whole Christmas cake thing surprised me. I knew people eat Christmas cake and I have heard the whole “Christmas Cake” term to refer to single woman past their 25th birthday (which many people here haven’t heard about, oddly enough, must be a foreigner thing, to focus on all the negative slang), but on Christmas Eve while I was out doing my shopping, I seriously was shocked at how much cake there was, everywhere, specifically for Christmas. It seemed like a tradition, having a special cake just for Christmas.

I was also shocked at how much shopping was being done at the Ginza and the likes on Christmas Eve and even day. In America everything is pretty much completely shut down but here most places remained open, to my knowledge. Not even that, but my boyfriend had to work on Christmas at the cram school he teaches at. Apparently kids actually showed up on Christmas. We were talking about it at the grocery store and he was like “very Japanese…” and I was like “yeah right I would never show up to school…”

It is a massive holiday here but it isn’t taken as seriously in America. I think Christmas is sometimes seen as the end all be all holiday of the year, the biggest most inconvient one, in a way, with all the preparation and head banging that gets put into it. Here, although it is just as large on a commercial scale, it isn’t a National holiday so it is viewed slightly differently, work and the like.

Oh, and as New Year’s is right around the corner I guess it is time for osouji, as my host mother keeps on talking about it and so doesn’t everyone else. I thought they were just cleaning to clean but I guess now is the time that you really clean clean clean for the new year, kind of like “spring cleaning” in America, eh.

Oh, in other news, my host family’s daughter gave birth to a baby girl on Christmas. We went to Funabashi to go visit her in the hospital and see the baby. I had never had that experience in my life so to have it here and with my host family was really special. They hadn’t picked a name for the baby so I really had to bite my tongue so I wouldn’t suggest “Jesus.” She was soooo cute though. I don’t think I have ever seen such a tiny baby up close before then. My host mother asked if I wanted to hold her and I was like uuuummmmm and backed away in terror. Me and 5 hour old babies aren’t the best match, methinks.

Anyways, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas~~~

Oh, I remember what I did over break, I went to Chris’s super fantastic gay birthday bash on Saturday. He had all his friends come out and we went to a shabu shabu restaurant followed by ni-chome, it was fun! Ni-chome is fun with the right crowd. I love the porn stores there, if anyone reading this wants to know where to get the good stuff, ni-chome is where it is at, yo. Wait, this blog is supposed to be educational ;;thinks;;

don’t read porn kids, it is bad, bad bad bad

well, maybe not bad as much as HILARIOUS, okay, enough of my bad taste.

I feel pretty well adjusted in Tokyo. I’m not sure what stage I would technically be labeled at this point in the game….I went through most of the culture shock stages pretty fast….due to certain recent events I love Tokyo, I can see myself living here for an extended period of time, so I would say I am almost in the completely adjusted stage. Hmmm, what else is going on….oh, I have a good topic for people who want to come to Japan to study abroad:

illness, or rather, why you will die in Japan

so things like the common colds are all different for every locale, right? Slightly mutated variations of one another, fueled by differences in the handling of food, water, hygenic materials, everything. I have found myself, as has some fellow international student friends, extremely easy to catch cold. In fact, I feel like lately I’m constantly sick. Goodness, I cannot remember when I could breathe out of my nose without medicinal spray. That is something no one really every talked about before coming. Everyone talks about the stupid silly things. They tell you you can’t come to Japan and not drink, you can’t not come and not eat meat, you can’t come and not get stared at for being “gaikokujin” blah blah blah and it is is all rubbish. I have met so many people and had so many experiences to just make those comments completely irrelevant. What no one focuses on, and what I think is much more relevant, is how being in a country away from the one where your immune system is adjusted, your going to get sick, especially when the seasons are different. Japan is very close to America in terms of season, especially Tokyo to New England, with the exception that the fall is extremely long. We still have leaves falling here, whereas I think Massachusetts already saw its first snow. What does that mean to my Bostonian body? Well, it means I’m confused as heck and my body doesn’t know how to react….so I find myself not sleeping, not getting better….it isn’t a good situation….so what does this mean? BRING LOTS OF DRUGS

yes, so there you have it, porn and drugs, preparation, preparation, preperation (H)

Today I went to Kamakura with my parents. It was a lot of fun. I didn’t sleep very well because I went out with Yugo to a halloween party followed by a club. I really don’t like the club, it makes me uncomfortable, but I like going out with my friends so whatever. It just makes me feel socially lame and bad at dancing, but where I come from that is cool. When I was in high school I always thought movies where the main character was a clutz was so cool. I proved the definition of that last night as I was walking down into Shinjuku Eki with Yugo, I was wearing these cowboy boots with no traction underneath, just clean soles, and it was raining, so I kind of slipped and caught my balance, and then before I knew it my feet came flying up out from underneath me and I was flat on my butt in the middle of entrance to the station, in the dirty rain water from Shinjuku. It was a lot of fun, oh yeah. Graceful. Whatever, someone has to find that sexy, right?

Right?

Well, I think its sexy. I want a boyfriend who will slip and fall on his ass with class, oh yeah. Okay, random, back to Kamakura. So Kamakura is known for it’s temples. I can’t express how many temples are in Kamakura, it is ridiculous. It has a very long history that goes back around the same time as Kyoto, it was actually the main part of Japan during the Kamakura Period, and from the 12th through 14th Centuries the Shoguns ruled from there in what is called the Kamakura Shogunate (thank you wikipedia).

We started out the day with the hour train ride to Kamakura, taking us through Yokohama. Once we arrived I was very pleasantly greeted with mountainous forrests and lush overgrowth. It looked like Hokkaido! I was so happy. We got off the train and onto this cute little antique rail car and took it down near the beach. Or first stop was to see the 大仏, the massive Amida Buddha statue. It was absolutely massive, and we were able to go inside since it was made of bronze and was hollow. Good stuff. Afterwards we went to 長谷寺, Hase-dera, an ancient Kannon temple that houses the largest wooden statue in Japan, of Kannon. The grounds were gorgeous, on the mountain overlooking the bay. There were gorgeous gardens and this little cave area where you walk through. I had to bend over and squat to walk through, it was so low. There were lots of little dark rooms and alcoves with hundreds of tiny figurines and candles, it was so beautiful. I do not know how to describe it, it was something you see in movies, it was so surreal.

We walked from the temple to this hotel my parents stayed at for New Years and had a very nice lunch. They menu didn’t have prices on it, it was one of those types of places. The manager came over and started talking to my parents and treating us like five star customers. They apparently knew one another or are regular costumers or something along those lines. Great service. It was very nice. Afterwards we took a taxi to 瑞泉寺, Zuisenji Temple, where my host mother’s father’s grave is located. The temple is way up on a mountain with this amazingly large dense rock garden filled with plum trees. Plum trees are gorgeous, like something out of a Nightmare Before Christmas, twisting around in ways that don’t look quiet natural. Plums also blossom in the winter, which I find amazing. Anyways, we met up with the rest of the family, my host mother’s mother, her older sister, her husband, and Yuki-chan, who I think is their grand-daughter or grand-niece. She was four years old and TERRIFIED of me, it was hilarious. She didn’t want to take a picture with me, she was like IYA DAAAA IYA DA! It was very amusing because earlier that day we had gone to a temple where the exact same thing happened only I was the one screaming no. There had been two young children in formal kimono celebrating their birthday by going to the shrine, special age, I believe three and five? Either way, my parents INSISTED of me taking pictures with them because the boy was wearing hakama and my mom was like LOOK, HE HAS A HAKAMA, so she was all like GO ASK, and I was like uuuuum I don’t feel like being the weird FOREIGNER TODAY and so they asked for me. The picture actually came out very nice, they looked so great. The entire temple was gorgeous but COVERED in spiderwebs with huge green and purple spiders on them. You had to walk right under them, several inches from your head, it was HORRIBLE. I almost died several times. I ran around screaming like a little girl to the amusement of my host mother. Seriously, though, you think of big spacious areas when you hear temple or shrine but just think of a really really dense overgrown forrest filled with lots of gorgeous plants and flowers and that is what it was like, with spiders EVERYWHERE, AH, 蜘蛛が大機らだ！
Anyways, back to Zuisenji, so we met up with the family and entered the inner temple. I was very glad I went and honored they included me in a such a private family function. We were guided by a monk to a tatami room where we sat and waited for the ceremony to begin. I sat crossed legged instead of trying seiza because I am lazy, haha. After a few minutes the monk returned and guided us to the inner part of the temple where they had an altar set up with offerings and incense and gorgeous flowers. We were guided to our seats and the ceremony started. It lasted maybe fifteen minutes and was very emotionally moving, the monks had beautiful voices and the combined effects of all my sensories together made for a very special moment I will remember for a long time, I am very honored they let me join them for such an intimate and private family function. Afterwards we went back to the tatami room and the monks came by one after the other (there were two for the ceremony) and they talked to the family and we relaxed and ate sweets and drank tea. I also sat in seiza for about thirty minutes, which I consider a great achievement. Wooo, I wanted to practice for my concert this friday, you have to sit in seiza when performing. Anyways, we left after about an hour, total time since arriving, and on the way out my mother explained how I was an international student and everyone was just kind of like ooooh, yeah, it was really amusing. They probably were like what is this random american doing here for this family function, I’m sure they figured it out, quiet obvious I’m living with the family since it was a private family funcstion, but still they never acted like I was out of the ordinary so I was very grateful. They also gave me an english guide and special shrine note paper/pad thingy my mother said people go to temples to collect. It was so nice of them! Buddhism just makes me so happy, I felt so welcome, it was like LOVE FOR ALL LOOOOOVEEEEE. We went into the graveyard and paid our respects and took a picture, which I felt a little uncomfortable joining in on, but they asked me so I agreed. The graveyard was in this quiet little valley near the top of a mountain with lots of trees and sculpture carved into the walls. It was gorgeous. It was an amazing experience and I’m so glad they let me be a part of it!

Afterwards we went to another temple, Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine, where they have a really famous Noh stage and is considered the most important shrine in the city of Kamakura, according to wikipedia ;;snicker;; It must be true, wikipedia said so, right? I really want to go back on New Year’s, my mother said the sakura-lined lane leading up to the temple fills with thousands and thousands of people and it is one of the biggest New Year’s Events in all of Japan.

Afterwards we went to 小町通 and walked the street, shopping and eventually stopped for dinner. I had an AMAZING fruit jelly parfeit to end the day. All in all, I had a wonderful time, and all on maybe four hours of sleep, woooooo hooooo. Anyways, pictures of Kamakura are going up on Flickr in the near future, so stay tuned, XD. Woooo school tomorrow, skipped class on friday, tomorrow should be awesome…or something.