weekend full of fun!

I haven't been writing in a few days now, which I think is a good sign as it means that I've actually had something to do! And school starts the day after tomorrow, too, so I'll probably have significantly less free time from now on. I'm very happy about that, excessive amounts of free time make me nuts. Anyway, it's been a busy weekend and weekstart (I don't think that's a word but never mind). On Saturday, we went to an izakaya with the Taiwanese girls. For all of you who aren't familiar with the concept, it's basically just a Japanese-style pub where you can eat and drink for quite cheap - usually they even offer a buffet kind of deal where you pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount of time you can spend chugging away as many drinks as you can. We didn't do that (this time), but I got to try Japanese beer and sake, which were both delicious! The beer was just basic draft beer, but it was a bit sweeter, I think, compared to Finnish beers, which I really liked. And the sake - well, in Finland I tried to learn to like sake which I bought at Alko, but now I realized that you don't really need to make an effort to like it if it's any good to begin with. Although this was only the first kind I've had here, and I bet it's not one of the best Japanese sakes, it was still very delicious to me.

Izakaya fun!

On Sunday, I went to Lake Biwa with my newly discovered Finnish friends. They're in a different class and different dormitories so for the first week or so the only information I had on them were their names on the student list they gave to us at the beginning. But of course at some point we were bound to find each other, and it's very nice to have people around who speak your own language, too.

Lake Biwa was just the sort of experience I was looking for right now. A short train journey away, but still kind of in the middle of nowhere. There were people having barbecues amongst the pine trees at the beach, small, empty cafés which probably have some customers during the holiday season, and it all looked so Mediterranean that you kind of expected to taste salt in the water as you went in for a swim. We had the weirdest encounter with some Brazilians who were having an extensive barbecue thing going on; this bikini-clad woman waved and yelled "Hello!" as we were walking by so we thought we'd go and ask where we could change into our swimsuits. But as we started to speak English, she just replied "no English" in Spanish or Portuguese or something. However, she did speak Japanese, which seemed kinda funny to me despite the fact that we are in Japan now. I don't know, you might understand if you'd seen this woman! So we were able to communicate in Japanese, and she showed us where the toilets were so it was all good.

At the seaside! Wait, no.

These mountains! You just cannot capture the immensity.

Afterwards, we went exploring the nearby town a little bit. There was a map at the station where it showed the locations of a couple of shrines, and we decided to walk up through the town to one of them. It wasn't too far away from the station and we still had plenty of time until the sun would set. On the map it looked like it was just a straight road towards the mountains that would take us to the shrine, but since we apparently took a wrong turn right at the beginning, we ended up walking criss-cross around the town, along streets that were so narrow that they rather looked like trails until a tiny old car suddenly passed you and you had to dodge into somebody's front yard. Except that, in many cases, there was not much of that between the houses and the roads, and you nearly ended up stepping into somebody's living room. Cozy.

This is how dead the town was.

They actually have pomegranate trees growing around. Kinda made me want to steal one, although these specimens don't look that good.

Too pretty to be true!

I question the necessity of these traffic lights.

Luckily this spider was so far away from me that I was able to admire its beauty instead of screaming my lungs out.

At the shrine.

One of the few residents in this village.

Those mountains, though!

After wandering around in a town so quiet it seemed like nobody was living there, it was a shock to arrive back at Kyoto Station, sun-kissed, hair still wet from the swimming with a few strands of seaweed dangling from it...

caaaake!

It's free cake day! Earlier today I went to Kyoto Station to meet up with Koami for lunch. As we were walking back to the bike garage to get my bicycle, we passed a crowd of people gathered in front of the main entrance of the station. So naturally we went to see what it was all about, and it turned out there was a game going on for which people were lining up for. Basically you just had to pull a trigger at the right time so that the bullet thingy hit the correct spot on a spinning wheel, and then you won a cake. It was a publicity stunt for this certain kind of cake that is apparently very popular here, and also quite expensive, as I was told by Koami.

Now if you think that I actually managed to hit the red spot... I didn't. But while we were lining up to play, the host asked me where I was from and what I was doing here and stuff, and since I was a foreigner, of course they gave me a consolation prize. So, thanks for playing, Finn, although you suck!

As I got back home, I read (on the small info sheet that I found in the box, and online in English as well to confirm the bits I didn't really understand) that the cake is only made in Kyoto, from ingredients that are very much all produced in Kyoto. The green stripes are matcha-flavored, and the white part is made with, and this was emphasized, soy milk.

And since no one else seemed to be home to share with, and I really wanted to try it right there and then, I made a cup of coffee for myself to go with a piece of cake. Eventually I ended up devouring the whole thing within 30 minutes. Simple but addictive, and I just love everything that's made with matcha. And it's not like it was that big a cake anyways... right? No but seriously, it was quite light and not too sweet, just the kind of cake that you can keep eating without feeling sick.

So that was an eventful day! This holiday just keeps getting better and better. Now I even know why they have the holiday - it's Silver Week! And what that is, I don't know, but I'll do the googling now so that you don't need to do it for me ;) I'm very good at googling, I just seem to have so much stuff to google about since I arrived here that I forget about half of it before I get a chance to go online. See, right now I nearly clicked on "Publish" since the sentence was so long that I didn't remember what I was previously talking about.

Alright, so this is what Wikipedia knows about the subject: Silver Week is actually just a term they came up with because there just happen to be a few random holidays in a row. On Monday, it was the Respect for the Aged Day, and on Wednesday, that is today, it's the Autumnal Equinox Day. And apparently, in Japan, if there is just one non-holiday in between two holidays that day becomes an extra holiday. That's lots of holidays. But tomorrow it's over... for two days, until it's the weekend again. Student life here is so hard. And right now my stomach is so busy digesting that cake that I'm just exhausted. Gotta go lie down for a bit.

on holiday

O hai! I'm so tired right now and I'm actually planning to write a post on several days' worth of adventures so bear with me if I can't remember the exact days when these activities took place. We've got a few days of holidays now, as if there has been much to do, anyway, since it's only the orientation period that's going on now. But of course on holidays you need to be out and about doing exciting things so we went to Fushimi Inari Taisha - which, to some, may not be that exciting but to me it's probably the farthest I've been from the dorm so far. Fushimi Inari Taisha is a huge, beautiful shrine, and the area is packed with tourists, especially on a Sunday (so yes, this was on Sunday). We probably had picked another day if only we had thought about it beforehand - I mean, when you're on holiday you don't really pay attention to which day it is.

Just a random shot at the Fushimi Inari station.

Let me take a selfie.

I can feel the electricity in the air.

Beyond the main grounds of the shrine (if you can make it through the masses of people), there's a trail leading up to the mountain called Inari, and it's lined with a kazillion of torii gates that apparently different companies etc. have donated. Apparently people usually come here for the mountain trail since the Taisha is actually nothing compared to the experience of walking through the trail and arriving to the top (or the halfway point in our case) to the most amazing view of Kyoto city. Apparently it's not really worth it to climb all the way to the top since it gets so cloudy that you don't really see much from up there. So we left it to those who really wanted a good exercise. And the halfway point view was still amazing, it was such a good weather that we could actually see all the way down to Osaka!

I just hope they're sturdy enough as not to collapse on me...

I guess not.

Well worth the climb.

At this point we gave up.

Almost back to where we started.

Wish away!

Dressed for a show that we just missed.

Back in central Kyoto, we decided we hadn't yet gotten enough of high places, so we went up to the roof of Kyoto Station, which I hadn't even realized was possible. And, to think of it, I didn't even know the building was as high as it turned out to be. Amazing views from there as well; if only they didn't have the stupid grey windows lining the entire terrace you'd be able to get a bunch of neat aerial shots around the city!

On top of Kyoto Station

Ghosts above Kyoto

Well, then, that was Sunday. Today, which is... Tuesday (took me a minute and I'm still not quite sure but let's go with that), we had made up our minds to go see the Jidai Matsuri, which is some sort of a festival for God knows what reason. I'm so ignorant about all this stuff, I don't even know why we're having the holiday now; and it's not like I'm the only one, I've been asking around and nobody else seems to have any clue, either! Anyways, so we went to the Imperial Palace where the Matsuri is supposed to begin, but there's nobody there. Finally we asked a couple of nice ladies who were just chilling in the park, and they were kind enough to inform us that it takes places on the 22nd of October. So as it's now September, we need to wait for another month to see the Matsuri.

Dressed for the occasion.

"Where is everybody?"

Instead, we went to have lunch, which we were planning to do afterwards, anyway. I was kinda happy about this turn of events because my stomach was already churning when we waiting for the Matsuri that never took place. We rode the chikatetsu to Shijo and then walked for a bit, so again I'm not quite sure where we ended up having lunch, but it was delicious, again. Japanese food never fails to tickle my taste buds. Unfortunately, as I just picked a random portion that looked good on the menu, my food was very much insufficient at my stage of hunger. Lucky for me, though, the girls' okonomiyaki were a tad too big for them to finish on their own so of course I had to be a good friend and help out...

I love it how you actually have a stove on your tabletop.

For dessert, we wanted to go get some soy ice cream at a place that was supposedly very famous for it, but we were too full to have that right away, so we walked around the Shijo-Sanjo area a little bit. And of course this had to be done at some point, so why not now? Not really going to publish the final result, though - not that it wasn't pretty, but now that we actually went there I decided to go full Japanese kawaii desu desu, and that was just kinda embarrassing.

Here it is!

the laundry challenge

Today did laundry for the first time. It's a very simple procedure, really, and it should take you about 2 minutes to put the clothes and the detergent into their own compartments and start the machine. But when the machine looks like this, it's closer to 20 minutes. So I tried to guess what everything meant and hoped for the best. At least it wasn't hard to figure out which button starts the program - probably the biggest one that says "start" on it in katakana.

In other news, I'm starting to understand the layout of this town. I know how to get from here to Kyoto Station, and to school; I'm getting quite familiar with the park around Imperial Palace (went there jogging for the second time this morning); I know where all the supermarkets, banks and post offices in the Imadegawa area are; and I've been to Sanjo a couple of times, which is one of the major shopping areas here, and just a 10-minute bike ride from our dorm. The only problem is that I've only gone there with Laura, so even though I know how to get there, I don't really know how to get around once I'm there, since it's a proper maze with the market area and all. But the most important spots I do remember, which are the inexpensive udon place, and the inexpensive sushi place where the plates go around on a conveyor belt. I think it's literally called conveyor belt sushi.

I didn't even know I liked noodles before coming here the first time.

This just combines my two favorite things in the world: Staring at a screen and eating (sushi).

Below there are a few more photos around the marketplace in Sanjo. It's quite touristy, thus pricy, but full of all kinds of intriguing shops and stalls that just make you want to buy everything. Today I was trying to find mochi - not that you really have to search for that as it's sold everywhere, but I was searching for a tad smaller packages, so I had to look around a bit - and in front of one of the shops there was a lady offering free samples of the mochi they were selling. I tried one and she basically shoved me into the shop, where they gave me a cup of green tea and I got to taste every flavor that they had on display. Luckily they were selling the kind of small packages I was originally looking for, as I was kinda obliged to buy something at that point.

Peek-a-boo!

They've got shrines everywhere, even in the middle of the busiest shopping areas.

Tomorrow, that is Sunday, we're going to Fushimi. Judging by the pictures I found on Google, it's bound to be amazing, but I won't be telling about that before I've actually been there! So that's going to be my weekend trip. I might have to come up with a plan for another trip, as well, for the beginning of next week, as we've got some random holiday in the middle of the orientation period... Any suggestions?

a rainy day

It's been a week! In honor of this remarkable milestone, the weather's been so lousy today that I've just felt like sleeping. Nevertheless, I did begin my day with a brief jog around the Imperial Palace that's next door, and it turned out to be a pretty good place for a morning jog. And one thing rainy weather is actually good for is running. Makes the exercise a whole lot more pleasant. After having some breakfast and today's nap number one, I went there again for a walk to take pictures of some pretty spots I saw earlier.

This guy was actually feeding the fish, but as we know, birds will never miss a chance on a free meal...

"Hands off my food!"

So apparently this shrine is for worshipping the cat. Works for me.

After my nap number two, I did some grocery shopping (again), just to get out of the house. I also decided that I have to start eating like the Japanese in order to save money. I can't really spend 10 euros per day just to have the fruit and veggies that I'm used to having at home. So, I finally got around to making my own miso soup from scratch, dashi and all. Also bought a two-kilo sack of rice yesterday, that should last for a while... Cooking in this tiny kitchen is a bit of a challenge, though, but I make do!

Maybe a bit more scallions that you'd have in a restaurant, but I just can't resist the greens.

And since I haven't posted a picture of Hawaii House yet, here's one I took on the way back home. So the building on the right is the one where I'm residing, and then there are a couple of other student houses in the same complex.

Such a pretty neighbourhood, isn't it!