We have been here ONE week!! It has gone by quickly, but I feel like I have learned much more than an average week's worth. As a week in review: we can now recognize some hiragana and katakana (Jim has studied more and is better than I am right now.) We also can say basic things: hello, goodbye, please, excuse me/I'm sorry, it's okay, do you understand English, I do not understand Japanese, yes, no, go ahead, thanks very much, good morning, good evening, when, where is ___, this, that, that over there, is, is not. We can also say random nouns like bank, cell phone, umbrella, book, etc.
This is certainly more Japanese than we came knowing, but we have SO much more to learn!
I am adjusting the style of my posts since not everyday will be exciting enough to recount all details. Yes, even life abroad can be mundane from time to time. I have gotten a little behind in my posting, partly because I have been out and about and partly because our internet connection at home is pretty spotty. (Our poor internet connection is perhaps the biggest hardship thus far! I was expecting higher speed internet than ever before, but alas. It is worse than home! Maybe because Kyoto is an old city, the internet technology isn't as advanced? Anyway, we are hoping for a better connection soon.)
Sunday:
In the afternoon we took a little walk in our neighborhood. For the month of November, we live in a quiet residential neighborhood in the Northeast section of Kyoto, very close to the surrounding hills. There is an imperial villa near us that we have been trying to see but it was closed again yesterday. (I finally looked in the guidebook and saw that you have to book a tour in advance.) We knew there was something else nearby, so we walked on a bit until we encountered what turned out to be a small temple-complex nestled in the woods. It was a lovely site, with beautiful small wood buildings with graceful sloped roof lines, so Asian in appearance.
I wish I knew more about Shinto and Buddhist beliefs and traditions, but hopefully I'll pick up some knowledge while we're here. From what our guidebook says, there are more than 1600 Buddhist temples and over 400 Shinto shrines and 17 World Heritage sites IN KYOTO!! Even if I saw a shrine a day and 5 temples, I still wouldn't see them all in seven months.
Monday:
Jim went to work but returned early because the professor with whom he needed to meet about his project was unavailable. I am surprised at how slow his work has been to get rolling, but I am happy he's had a little time to adjust and get settled. In the search for a better internet connection, we biked nearly an hour across the North part of Kyoto to a cafe that our guidebook said had free wifi. When we finally found it we discovered that it is now just an internet place—and expensive. So, we turned around and biked home again. (I have been getting lots of exercise, biking all around these days!)
You may wonder why we didn't call first or check online. Here is the situation:
1.Calling: we have no land line and no cell phones, so unless we use a pay phone, this is not really an option. Besides, calling in Japanese is not an option and there is little chance that the person answering speaks English.
2.Online: probably it wouldn't have an English website and we can't read yet. :P
Our trip wasn't all for naught because we did locate the Botanical gardens. We decided to save the gardens for another day when we would have more daylight hours. We also biked through the Imperial Palace park. The Imperial Palace itself is available for visiting but you have to apply and be granted permission to enter. Oddly enough, it is reportedly easier for foreigners to get it within a day or so, whereas locals may have to wait months for admission. This may be the only thing for which foreigners get preferential treatment. Everything else seems very geared to the non-foreigner. (More on this later.)
Surrounding the imperial palace is a large park whose most striking feature is the massive gravel pathways through it. Seriously, these park “pathways” are more than twice the size of any street in Kyoto. Strange. At least the park does have a number of trees and adds a nice green space to the city.
Tuesday:
We attended our first Klexon meeting tonight. Klexon is a cross-cultural group that meets to share culture and give Japanese folks a chance to practice their English. Jeff and Mery told us about the group, so we thought we'd try it out. Getting there was a little tricky...
We still don't have cell phones (we need a bank account and an alien card first.) As a result, we must plan to meet in advance and cannot change these plans. We had decided to meet at the International Community House because it was nearer to the Klexon meeting place and there were Japanese culture films being played there. Of course, it looked like rain when I headed out on bike, and I thought we might prefer to take the bus...Sure enough, by the time Jim meet me it was pouring and he was quite wet. We then had to bike to the meeting. We had rain jackets and I had rain pants, but apparently our rain gear isn't too good since we were both wet upon arrival. The meeting place was farther away than I had originally realized, so we ended up having to bike through the one big downtown street of Kyoto. (We bike on the sidewalk here, because everyone else does. This works fine except in areas with lots of foot traffic.) Needless to say, there were so many people downtown that we had to walk our bikes through the crowd. (Picture suave looking dry people with two wet, rain clothes-clad white people and their bikes. I felt a little silly.) When we finally reached the intersection of the Klexon place, we couldn't tell from our map which tall building was the right one. So, we ended up going to the second floor of four different buildings before we finally asked a tiny woman who was cleaning in a lobby. She pointed out the correct building, but then she insisted that we wait. We weren't sure what we were waiting for, but sure enough, she came back with two umbrellas and BEGGED us to take them. [Note: when it rains everyone carries an umbrella, even bikers. Many bikes have an umbrella holster for when it is not in use. Wearing raincoats and not carrying umbrellas is an oddity, I think.] We had learned the Japanese for it's okay, so we insisted that we were fine without her umbrellas. (Besides, we had no idea how or when to get them back to her since our Japanese is not sufficient yet.) She was so sweet, though.
Finally we made it to the Klexon, nearly an hour late. Yikes. I had considered not going, but after everything we had gone through to get there, it seemed like we should at least see where it was. Fortunately, I think we, as native English speakers, are enough of a commodity that our presence, even late, was appreciated. We were showed to seats and jumped right in to the action. The meeting was interesting. It was highly structured--maybe to alleviate awkwardness. First, there was pair work in which one row moved every few minutes. In pairs, we were to talk about what prefecture we would like to see in Kyoto. Next was group work in which we had several tasks to discuss like describing games we played when we were young. I ended up talking with people more generally since I was meeting them all for the first time and it was actually really enjoyable. Since the goal was for cross-cultural communication and English speaking, it was a great way for us to meet new Japanese with whom we could converse and ask questions about culture. We will definitely attend Klexon again.
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