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...