I’m feeling a bit better now, so I promise no more sad stuff on this blog! My time in Kyoto is coming to a close soon, and I’m kinda disappointed in myself for not visiting more shrines and temples. There are apparently over 2,000 in total, and I’ve seen maybe three, though they were definitely three big ones. The third one is Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) which I saw a few days ago with Noah. After reading Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a classic Japanese novel about the monk who burned down the temple in 1950, I was excited to follow in the main character’s footsteps and see with my own eyes the beautiful temple that he raved about. When I actually saw it, though, it was kind of a letdown. First off, it’s not that big. And maybe it was because it was cloudy that day, but it wasn’t as pretty as I expected it to be. Only the top two floors were golden, actually–I guess they were redone after the tragic burning–but for some reason the bottom floor was kinda bad-looking. It looked good in the pictures I took, though haha. There wasn’t much else to do–you see the temple and then you leave–so Noah and I went to a nearby area with a bunch of old shrines, hoping to find this famous Zen rock garden. We didn’t find it, but we did go into a couple of the shrines, which weren’t all that interesting to be honest. But we topped it off with kaiten-zushi, which made up for it haha.
Sam, the other foreign exchange student in our program who is doing the same Kyoto program that me and Kayla have been doing the past month, but starting in a few days, just got to Kyoto. We met up with him at Starbucks and told him a bit about the two places he’ll be working at. We also planned out some stuff to do tomorrow: Sam and I are gonna go to the day center, so I can get my shoes that I forgot and give this guy a mix CD, and also to show Sam around. Then afterwards we’re gonna meet up with Noah and go to Nara, and probably get attacked by deer haha.
That’s all for today. Here are some pictures from Kinkakuji:
Here’s the second single off Coldplay’s upcoming album, another very low-key song. I’m liking this direction.
My Year In Tokyo 