Thursday April 15 2004

Yay! My homestay is over! I DID enjoy it, but I’m also glad it’s finished. I’m intending to at least try and stay in touch with A. and her family, but I’m not sure, it’ll depend on whether or not they reply, I don’t really mind either way.

Kyoto is lovely, Ms D. told us before we arrived that this is her favourite part of Japan. I can already see why and I’ve only been here a few hours! This is the most traditional place we’re going, we’re staying in a ryokan (traditional inn), which is interesting. We’d only been there 5 minutes when chaos broke out! S., B., D.and S. are in a big room together and one of their side windows had a metal grill on the outside. I say HAD because it fell out! I stood there and watched the thing fall out onto the ground below! Nobody was even near it! E. had to go and get the owner and try to explain, which was nearly impossible because he didn’t understand English! She said ‘Mado! Mado!’ (window) and pointed to the hole where it used to be. Eventually he caught on and fixed it, but the incidents didn’t end there!

There’s a pond in the courtyard with these GIANT carp in it. When everyone went down to look at the grill, C.noticed one of the fish had got out of the water and was flopping around on the ground! The poor owner must have thought these New Zealanders were extremely strange! I think the fish survived, if it didn’t die from the shock of everything going on around it!

Today we did a lot of shopping, mostly in 100¥ shops. 100¥ is about NZ$1.40 and there’s some cool stuff in them, not just junk like in our $2 shops in NZ.

Kyoto station. I wonder who cleans all those windows!?

Don’t remember which day we visited Kinkakuji but I think it was today!

Friday April 16 2004

Today we went to a temple called Kiyomizudera, It was very cool. Another favourite place, I think. There were 3 fountains where, if you drink our of them, they bring you love, wealth and beauty. This sounded good to us, so when J. and I were there, Ms D. came over with her camera. I hid behind one of the big stone pillars so she couldn’t see me. I stood there for awhile until I thought she’d just taken a photo anyway and left. As I stuck my head out to see if she’d gone, I saw a camera flash! I was like ‘Great. Now she doesn’t just have a photo of me, she has a silly photo of me!’ Oh well, could have been worse, at least I didn’t fall into the fountain!

There were lots of little traditional shops at Kiyomizudera. It’s hard to describe since there’s nothing like it in NZ. You come out of the main temple and go down this really steep hill and there are shops the whole way down, which is cool. Then, eventually, if you haven’t got lost, you go down a side street and end up at this other little shrine, which is where our group met up again.

Then we went to Gion and saw geisha, which was amazing. They weren’t very happy about us taking photos of them though, they ran away! Oh well, at least we didn’t hide in an alleyway and jump out like the last group did! That was going a little too far. According to Mrs K., a lot of Westerners wrongly believe that geisha are prostitutes because their job is to entertain men. Most geisha are really proud of their traditional job and status, but are embarrassed that people think they’re prostitutes, so they don’t like having their photos taken.

Kiyomizudera – this is a scan of a postcard, not a photograph.

Another one of my favourite photos. I don’t remember where this is, but I love it!

Geisha in Gion.

Saturday April 17 2004

Nara today, which had a really big Buddha and the biggest wooden structure in the world (Todaiji). I took a lot of photos and bought quite a lot of stuff.

It was very funny when we were having lunch because this deer came up to us. Mrs K. doesn’t like deer, so she decided to try and frighten it away, by squirting it with water from her water bottle! Unfortunately for her, the deer didn’t mind and just kept coming! Mrs K. was like ‘Er, this isn’t good. No, go away! Bad deer! Shoo!’ It obviously never occurred to her to like, run towards it waving her arms and shouting or something! Ms Ditfort was very amused and said ‘If that deer chases her, I will laugh so hard!’ It didn’t though. I think it just got bored with watching us and just wandered off! I seem to be allergic to deer, both times I’ve been near them (here and at Miyajima Island), I’ve started sneezing like crazy!

Todaiji, and yes it really was as ginormous as it looks!