That's a brief description of my week. Now to put it in picture form.
Starting with the sakura.
Sunday, Akiko and I went to Omiya Park for sakura viewing. This park was bigger than the previous one, and it was WAY more crowded, as you can see. There were lots of food stands, and the atmosphere was similar to a festival. Tons of people were sitting on the grass, eating, drinking, and some were doing karaoke. O_o
This stand had neat candy.
I take too many pictures of dogs. D:
Akiko and I walked around a bit trying to figure out what to do when a little boy came up to Akiko crying. He had gotten lost and couldn't find his parents. The boy was just 4, so he was scared, lol. I don't blame him. I got lots once when I was around his age...at a festival, in fact, and it was terrifying. Especially since it was night time, lol. Anyway, we walked around a bit trying to spot his parents, but no such luck. We took him to an area where police were situated so that they could get his info and announce his position over the sound system. (Neither of us ever heard it though...) From there, we walked to a small zoo that was nearby, and admission was free that day, so we took a look around. Nothing really notable, except they had a hyena. I don't believe I've ever seen one of those in person before. Also, they had a cage with a couple of ORLY owls. They were adorable and hilarious. Their head movements are so funny. I had to take a picture.
After we ate lunch, we walked past the Hikawa shinto shrine. It was on our way to Omiya station.
Kamakura
We were originally told to meet at Sophia at 8:30, which is early enough as it is, but then at the last minute they told us to come 15 minutes earlier (not that it mattered in the end), so that was no fun. We took a train to Kamakura, which took FOREVER because we took a local train all the way there from Tokyo station.
From here, I don't remember the names of the places, so I'll just like, make this part mostly pictures, sorry. :T
I meant to take a picture of the other dog, but didn't get to. This one has its mouth open for the first Japanese syllable, "a". The other has its mouth closed for the last syllable, "n". Apparently this is the case for a lot of the gate guardian-type statues. Interesting.
The right side of the bridge is the "Minamoto" pond, which is supposed to represent prosperity since the Minamoto clan defeated the Taira. Which brings us to the other side of the bridge:
It's smaller and is supposed to suck and represent defeat, but I personally think it was prettier, and cute. Whatevs.
There was some kind of shinto ceremony going on when we walked through. No idea what kind of ceremony though.
Apparently these are supposed to be beer donations, except...the barrels don't contain anything. Talk about stingy donations, jeez.
Gate guardians.
On our way to lunch, we walked through a really narrow area that I can't even call a backstreet since no cars or even bikes, really, could fit well. It was really cute.
After lunch, our group somehow managed to get way ahead of everyone else, so we took a small detour to visit our tour guide's husband's family's shrine?
I liked the view on the way back.
Nothing of significance, just a house I thought was ADORABLE. I want it.
Next up was the giant Buddha statue.
Some school made giant sandals for the Buddha and donated it to the temple. XD
Thing was big. It's second only to the Buddha in Nara. It used to be covered in gold leaf, but obviously that didn't last. There's a small hint of it left on the cheek, but that's about it.
He was originally surrounded by lotus petals, but since they had to revamp the base, they had to get rid of most of the petals, but kept like 4. They have writing carved in them.
If you paid 20 yen, you could actually go inside the Buddha, lol. My group wanted to go in, so I went in too. It was weird.
The hole at the top is the head.
This pigeon had some weird colors. O_o Sorry, random.
Next up was Hase. It was really pretty.
I don't know what the heck this was, but I thought it looked cool.
There was another wall of those little statues. There were a ton. They're supposed to represent the unborn babies.
This thing contained all of the sutra texts and scrolls. They rotate the thing once a month.
The Tokugawa crest was on one of the poles.
There was a cave filled with these. They looked like little figures that were just thrown all over the place.
The view from the top of the hill was...the ocean!
I haven't seen the ocean in a long time, so it was refreshing (and surprising - I didn't realize Kamakura was right on the coast) to see.
Clubs
I randomly felt like dressing myself up a bit, and I thought the results were cute, so I took a picture:
I'm slowly getting the hang of this make up thing.
On Thursday, the keiongakubu was doing their public performance/advertisement, and I wanted to see it, so I got up early and just barely made it there on time. They were kind of hilarious. The first couple of groups did the norm, though in comparison to the keion from my high school, they seem to be a lot less awkward and a lot more into having fun, which is nice.
For the last song, things got ridiculous. The last song was an instrumental song that was pretty long, and like, there were two bassists. One of them had one guy (without an instrument) get on his shoulders, and he struggled to play and keep his balance, but nearly failed. After a while, get got down on the ground so the guy could get off of him, but big wtf. I should have taken a picture. Then at that end of the song, everyone basically went nuts and threw instruments and even launched themselves Yoshiki-style into the drumsets. I was like WTF ARE YOU SERIOUS? Lol'd for sure but I couldn't believe they were doing that.
I wandered around taking pictures of the area, just to capture the atmosphere.
Then I moved onto some stairs and took a couple from above.
The keion was planning to do a sakura-viewing party at 5:30, and I had a ton of time to blow, so I circled the outside of the campus.
This is the baseball area beind all the sakura. Obviously.
Across from the fields is this area. Not sure what part of the city it is, but I thought the view was neat.
I ended up talking to some keion members around 3:30 or so, and one of them took me up to the room where they were performing and handing out sign-up sheets so I could watch. I had nothing better to do. I met two girls, Hyoko?? (I couldn't hear her well;;) and Chiaki, both of which were nice. When 5-ish rolled around, we started heading outside and to the area with the sakura. We started to get situated, but then remembered that they needed to go get all the freshmen that were planning to attend from the front gate, so we went back for them. There I saw that another CIEE student was amongst the crowd, and he is planning on joining as a drummer. He seems pretty cool, and understands my wanting to focus on Japanese and not so much English (though I don't mind being friends). I think he feels the same way, so I'm not too worried about us falling back on each other with English. After we gathered all the new students, we went back up to the sakura area and chilled. Eventually, sempai brought along snacks and drinks, and we all spent the evening chatting about origins, favorite bands, and the parts we want to play. Everyone seems like a lot of fun, and they're really welcoming. I've never hung out with a bunch of Japanese guys like that before though, so it was a little awkward. I'm not used to that personality, and the girls tend to talk more politely and cleanly, so they were hard to understand. x_x Fail. But that's another goal for me. Everyone always talks to me slower than usual, so when everyone was talking normally, I had a hard time keeping up, but I did okay. It will just take getting used to. Anyway, pictures.
These three guys came over and sat down with us not long before I took this. I was originally trying to take a picture of the entire group (see below), but as soon as I took out my camera, they both posed like that, lol, so I took their picture. I don't know their names though. D:
I was at the end, so this is basically the entire group. Tons of people. This club houses more than 100 members regularly. @_@ Christ.
These are the two I was sitting with originally. Never got their names either.;;; The girl on the right was sooo quiet though. I could hardly hear her most of the time.
She was nice though, and offered to have our picture taken together, and thus. Don't mind my goofy face.
The party was a lot of fun, and it was nice to get a feel for the kinds of people that are in that club. I feel a little less scared to join as one of the only two foreign kids, lol.
That's about all I have. Classes start on Monday, so I'll be spending the weekend figuring out what to take, because lol, I'm totally not even registered for classes yet. This school is weird. I'll also be registering for my fall classes at IU. @_@
