The Road Less Traveled

Kyoto & Toyota

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized

Hi again Just to start things off, let me update you all on what’s going on in my life. After we started going on trips, I began failing my kanji quizzes repeatedly because I didn’t have nearly enough time to study. Well, I finally got back on track yesterday, and I believe I got a 9/10! Yay! Keep your fingers crossed that I do as well on the one on Thursday. That’s pretty much it for class… everything else is going pretty steadily.

Aisde from that, this Saturday and Sunday we will be our first homestay experience. We got the information about the families we’ll be staying with today. I’ll be staying with the Maeda family, it seems. Their home has the mother, father, grandmother (they wrote “granma”), and 3 children: Shoichiro (10), Misato (7), and Kenjiro (7). If you can’t tell the gender by their names (I can XD), they’re boy, girl, boy, respectively. I’m a bit confused, to tell the truth, because the homestay thing is being conducted by a local middle school… and none of those children are in middle school. So yeah, I’m a bit confused… anyway, it’ll be interesting. Especially because on the form, they filled in the “Ability of English” item as “Poor”… that’ll be fun. XD

Anyway, I should probably get on to what I’m actually writing about, and what you were probably expecting to read about from the title of this post: Kyoto & Toyota. I’m going to wrap these trips up into one post, because honestly, I didn’t really enjoy either of them very much. But whatever. That’ll happen from time to time, am I right?

So, on Friday, Oct. 24th, at about 8:30am if I recall, we got on the bus for Kyoto and were on our way. The trip started out a bit slow… the bus ride was a bit long, and there really wasn’t anything to do. I ended up playing kanji-studying games on my psp for quite a while. I learned that I’m not nearly as good as a 3rd grader here! Woo! That’s a self-esteem boost! Actually, though that was actually sarcasm (in case you didn’t notice), it actually ended up being just a tiny little boost. Because though I learned I wasn’t as good as a 3rd grader, I found out that I was as good as a 2nd grader. Which is awesome. Though I barely passed that test. XD

But I digress. Honestly, I can’t really remember very well where we went first, but on the first day (Friday) we basically went to two places… Kiyomizu-dera and Kinkaku-ji. At least, I think that’s all… who knows. Kiyomizu-dera is a Buddhist temple that is famous for a couple different things. First of all, it’s really old, originally constructed in 798 — though its current buildings were only built in 1633. That’s still pretty old, though. It’s also famous for its large veranda, 13 meters tall, and 3 waterfalls that flow beneath it. It’s said that drinking from the waterfalls either grants you longevity, wisdom, or health, but you can’t drink from all 3, because that’s greedy.

Kinkaku-ji is another Buddhist temple, but this one, the top 2 stories are completely covered in gold leaf. It’s rather beautiful… but that’s really all I have to say about it. Sorry. :/

I guess I should mention at this point that on this trip, we had a tour guide. The tours they took us on were pretty lame. They pretty much consisted of going to a place, giving us about a 5 minute tour and explanation, and then a couple hours of free time (this varied with each location). Honestly, this is pretty much why I didn’t the trip.

Anyway, we may or may not have gone to another place after that, but I don’t really remember. In any case, we eventually got back on the bus and rode to the hotel. It was a ryokan, or Japanese-style hotel. In a ryokan, there are no beds. The floors are tatami mats (made of woven soft rush straw) and you sleep on futons. Now let me set something straight that most Americans don’t really understand. A futon is not a couch thing that folds into a bed. Instead, they are just a thin mattress, almost like a quilt, that you sleep on top of. Well, that’s not 100% true, you sleep on top of one, and under one, though they are slightly different. Honestly, I really, really like Japanese futons. They’re amazingly comfortable to me. But again, I’m digressing.

So we ate dinner at the ryokan. It was a traditional Japanese meal with about 8 courses. Each course was pretty small, though, so it wasn’t too big. After the first 3 courses or so, they opened up the karaoke mic and everybody got to singing. There are a bunch of pictures of me singing floating around. My favorite was when about 10 of us got up and sang “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. It was awesome.

Anyway, on to day 2! I don’t really remember much about this day. We went to like 6 different places, and none of them were very interesting, because pretty much, I didn’t even know the names of them. Yeah, great tour guide, right? Also, since I spent well over $100 on the Hiroshima trip, I’d decided to not spend so much in Kyoto… I ended up only taking $20, and it was pretty much gone by day 2. I also forgot my camera on the bus, so I couldn’t take pictures. Woo.

So we finally got back to Chubu at about 10pm on the 25th, and we were all pretty dead tired. Of course, I failed my kanji quizzes that week, but whatever. It’ll all be good. Time to move on to the other (rather short) part of this post: Toyota.

Let’s see how short I can make this… The next weekend after Kyoto, on Oct. 31, we took a day trip to the Toyota car museum and factory. All of their factories are in Aichi prefecture, the same prefecture as Nagoya and Chubu University. The car museum had cars in it… it would probably have been pretty interesting if I cared at all about cars. But I don’t, so it was kinda boring. Then we had lunch. We went to a big huge park about 30 minutes in the opposite direction from where we’d be going next. It was nice, but there were TONS of children. Like hundreds… the child-to-adult ratio was like 20:1. It was rather strange, especially given Japan’s extremely low birth rate. Anyway, after lunch we drove 30 minutes *BACK* to the Toyota factory. We got another somewhat lame tour through the factory — though, seeing the robots building the cars was kinda cool. After the factory, we went to some other museum thing and saw robots, yay! Then we came home. And that was our trip to Toyota. It clearly had a huge impact on my life, taught me a lot about Japan, and was extremely, extremely fun — so much so, in fact, that I can’t express it in words.

So yeah, those were pretty much among the lamest trips ever. Though I did learn that I suck at kanji, so hey, I got something out of it!

Anyway, next time I might be writing about the homestay experience, but I also might be writing about the University Festival that was held Nov. 1-3 here at Chubu… who knows. I guess we’ll see later. Bye!

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