27 March 2013 · Comment
Some pictures
Woo! I just finished my second and potentially last round of thesis corrections! I could be unofficially graduated in less than a week! Unfortunately this required further ruining my already questionable sleeping schedule but you win some you lose some. So I’m just gonna leave these pictures here for now and hopefully caption them tomorrow night or on the train tomorrow day but I have an amazing capacity for laziness so we’ll see!
Hey I’m back! Writing on the train from Matsuyama to Naoshima. Which means these pictures are now like, five places out of date. Whoopsies! These are the last of my pictures from Kyoto and Nara, and then I went to Osaka, Miyajima, Hiroshima and Matsuyama. Urglegrue that’s a lot of places in not a lot of time. In my defense, it’s spring break time AND cherry blossom season so all the hotels are packed and it’s hard to find a room for even two consecutive nights which means I’ve been like, sprinting around the country. But at least it looks like I’m going to be able to see all of the things I really wanted to see on this trip! So that’s fairly raven. I wouldn’t say it’s SO raven but it’s definitely pretty raven.
Here’s a picture of the bamboo grove in Arashiyama near Kyoto, which is where I met that delightful group of Spaniards. Hopefully we can meet up when I go to Europe next week! They were super fun. We passed a bunch of adorable babies and one of them said he wanted to steal one, which was the exact thought I was having at that moment but I thought we were too early on in our friendship for it to be acceptable to joke about baby snatching but apparently we weren’t!
I know it’s really disrespectful to the bamboo, but I just couldn’t get over how neat the Japanese graffiti was. Also this picture brings up how weird it feels to basically be illiterate again. English isn’t super widely spoken or written here so even the dumbest things like reading a map can turn into a huge confusing affair. I can read two of the three writing systems pretty well so that’s usually enough to get by, but I’ve regressed to slowly sounding words out, like while moving my lips and everything and I must look so dumb. Fortunately everyone I’ve met has been very nice and understanding and helpful so far, so fingers crossed I don’t miss my plane or anything. And I do feel like I’ve been learning a lot more Japanese on this trip than I was able to learn on my own at home, so that’s nice. Like in this picture, I could read that the thing under the 8 was the Japanese character for “5,” but then I was trying to remember what the character to the left of the “.18” was and then I realized it was a 5 with the top line disconnected from the bottom DURR. But for the record, it does look a lot like the character for the “ra” sound, so I guess it’s only a little durr.
Some tree shadows falling on some moss. Yurp.
I’m like, 75% sure that this little soldier dog dude is saying not to smoke because you could set the bamboo grove on fire.
Some roughage growing over a wooden sign. Japan, how’d you get so pretty?
A nice street in Gion in Kyoto. This picture really brings it home how I am living my life on a loop with a six year long period. I came to this exact street in 2007 after my first college graduation, and I’m about to move back into the apartment I left six years ago to work at the company where I interned in 2006. So maybe it’s not a loop, maybe it’s more like a palindrome. Whoa yeah, it kind of is totally a palindrome because I haven’t graduated yet. Weird. Too bad I must remain a withered husk of my former self and can’t palindrome away the aging process!
After attempting to recapture my lost youth in Kyoto, I spent the day in the Osaka Apple store making my first round of thesis corrections and then I went to Nara, which is known for its glorious giant Buddha statue and for having tons of deer everywhere. I was scared that the deer were going to be one of those things that everyone says you have to see but then turns out to just be like, the thing to see and not really anything else besides that if that makes sense, but they were really interesting. They’re wild deer but they don’t even seem to notice all the tourists around them unless they’re looking for food. I walked up to one in a park and started petting it and you know what it did? Nothing. Well, nothing but maybe give me a parasite, the jury’s still out on that one. Also I kept hearing this noise sort of like a single cicada whining and then I finally realized it was coming from some of the deer. They were just standing there going “nyeeeeeeeah” through their moist deer noses. Which made me even more worried that it wasn’t healthy for them to be all overexposed to people like this but what can you do.
There’s a whole job dedicated to sweeping up deer poop. Which is good because they’re quite the prolific poopers. It comes flying out of their fluffy butts like candy out of a gumball machine or coins out of a slot machine. Cha-ching! You just hit the poop jackpot.
This deer was just going to town on that chain. Maybe it was salty or something. He kept licking it obsessively for a long time and then he’d spit it out like “pleeeah” and then a minute later he’d start again. Sorry humans are ruining the natural order of your world, little buddy!
A warning sign about how the deer are wild animals and they’ll mess you up.
The temple where the gigantic glorious Buddha is kept. Its name is Todai-ji. No I did not just look that up in Lonely Planet. What.
And the gigantic glorious Buddha! Its name is the Daibutsu and it’s pretty awesome to see in person. Like awesome in the literal sense, not in the surfer sense. I don’t think this picture nearly does it justice but the colors and stuff are kind of nice so whatever.
Some things from a temple near the Daibutsu. What are these things called? I don’t knowwwww I am so ignorant of the world. Maybe they’re just called lanterns? I don’t know I’m the worst. But they are pretty so here is a picture.
Yay I finished with the pictures of Kyoto and Nara! Now I’m waiting for the ferry to take me the last leg of the trip to Naoshima where I’m gonna see some art! Awesome.
Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
« Welp» Well har de doo dooo