Meeting people, eating sushi, and climbing mountains

We had a special session of class today, which wound up being one of the most difficult class periods I can remember, including any number of tests. Our teachers got some volunteer Japanese students to come into class and talk with us. We were to interview them about recommendations for improving at various aspects of learning the Japanese language, both in groups of four and one-on-one. I did get some good ideas out of this, but it's still quite hard to ask these sorts of questions, and frequently it's hard for me to understand the answers as well.

After going through the relevant class items, we could talk with them about whatever we wanted, as long as it wasn't in English--this part of it was much more fun, and quite a bit easier. I asked everyone for recommendations on books to read, and one of them is going to let me borrow books. In talking with her, I also found out this student spent a year studying abroad in Boulder, Colorado at the same time that I lived in Castle Rock, Colorado. Interesting.

In a little while tonight, I will be going out with a bunch of the students for sushi. While a couple of the students prepared sashimi for the potluck party a couple of weekends ago, I haven't gone out for sushi since I got here. This is actually the longest I've gone this calender year without having sushi. Clearly this must (and will) be fixed.

Meanwhile, probably due to my reduced level of activity compared to the summer, I've been having problems getting to sleep for the last week. In order to fix this, on Sunday I'm going to go climb a mountain.
The visible high point is 愛宕山 (Atago-yama, or Mount Atago), which is the highest point in this ward and the highest of the mountains immediately surrounding Kyoto. At 924m elevation (3031ft) vs my dorm's 71m (234ft), 7.08km or 4.4 miles away in a straight line, it should make for a decently tiring and scenic but short excursion. Unless I bring along slow people. Which I'll try to do because they'll whine and I'll think it's funny.

Mostly quiet on the Eastern Front

I've skipped a couple days' worth of posts due to school and other occurences, but this also has the effect of allowing me to make a full post. Hoorah!

Tuesday, I woke up early to go to the bank, withdraw money, and then pay my rent and class fees before the 10:30 am rent deadline. During mild rain I set out on my creaky bike. I got halfway between the first and second lights after Ninna-ji, standing and mashing the pedals as usual since the bike is too small, when suddenly the left pedal (which had more of a grinding feel anyway) starting feeling wobbly. I sat down immediately and looked down at my foot while pedaling. Within one more pedal revolution, the left crankarm of the bike fell off. Great... either the nut that holds the arm on wasn't properly torqued and I pedalled hard enough to loosen it, or it wasn't there in the first place and I finally managed to break the rust. Anyway, I got to do some extra walking, but still wound up getting everything done before the rent deadline. Although it's been established that there's nothing that happens if you don't pay on time, I wanted to get it done on time anyway.

After classes, I got the bike fixed at a nearby shop for a pittance. The bike no longer creaks with every pedal stroke. I got the third and last of my textbooks, the one for my conversation class, which brings my total textbook expense for the semester to 6210円, or about $59.14 at the current rate. After five semesters of buying textbooks for UNM, this is astounding to me.

Wednesday I had only one class session, and the weather was fantastic, so I went to Kinkaku-ji. While I didn't have the mental energy to make a blog post afterwards, I did do a pretty decent job of captioning my gallery of it. Here's a direct link to the gallery.

Anyway, I have now been to every class at least once. Out of ten 90-minute class sessions per week, one is taught in English. My language class teachers have demonstrated that they can speak English just fine, but without actually saying it they've conveyed that we should only bail out and cheat when we absolutely can't think of how to ask something in Japanese. So far the workload is low. I did one assignment during the week, and I did about half of my weekend's homework today in about an hour. This means I should be able to get a good amount of kanji study in over the weekend. For this semester's kanji, I already know 140 out of 252 of them reasonably well; over the weekend I could get to where I know all of them reasonably well, and if I review them enough I could know them all permanently by the end of the month. Because learning this amount of kanji sounds relatively easy to me, I'm going to up the ante and study the B class's kanji as well. I think it's worth the effort for me to try to bump up to A next semester instead of going to B like normal.

In other news, today, I got a friendly simultaneous reminder that it's good to be in Japan, and that it's also still a good idea to pay attention instead of being a retard. After my classes and buying a composition notebook for the weekend's homework, I noticed my keys were not in my pocket. After a moment of panic, I decided the most likely cause of this was that I left my keys sitting in the bike lock. I got to my bike, and sure enough, it was there, locked, with the key sitting in the lock, untouched. I wouldn't ever expect to see my bike again if I did that at UNM, but then, at UNM they don't have multiple bike parking lots like this:
The second floor.
The first floor.
A constant line of people going in to the 2nd floor - the first floor is closed and full. Since my shot of the first floor has an admittedly crappy exposure, to put this into proper perspective, there's parking room for approximately 6000 bikes on the first floor alone. There's another bike lot the same size as this one at the south gate, and a 2nd-floor-only lot that's not quite as big at the north gate. There are lot attendants almost always on duty making sure that the bikes are packed in nice and tight. The traffic, the attendants, and the fact that it's Japan probably all deserve credit for my bike still being there.

Admittedly, if my bike had vanished, I wouldn't have been terribly upset. But, I would have been disgruntled that my room key and helmet were gone. It would cost me at least 50% more to replace the helmet than to buy another bike of that caliber.

Yesterday: 東本願寺 and 京都駅

Yesterday was a national holiday (Fall Equinox), so there were no school-related activities to be done, and everybody made plans to go out and about. I was initially going to go to the Kyoto National Museum, but after talking with a bunch of people decided to go along with Aoife, Alysson, Bob, and Pernilla on a bike trip to Fushimi-inari-taisha, a shrine in the southern part of Kyoto photographically famous for its hall of gates.

The original plan got changed when Alysson's rear tire decided that holding on to air was too high of a demand. We started asking people if they knew where any bike shops are, but had no luck. Since it was a national holiday, all the bike shops, as far as everyone knew, were closed. So eventually we got to a service station (with Alysson pushing her bike almost the entire time), and got some air shot into the thing... which did no good at all.

So, we modified the plans to fit the situation, and went to nearby Higashi Honganji, another of the big, famous temples. This one is specifically famous for being big: the Founder's Hall is one of many buildings that is claimed to be the biggest wooden structure in the world (there are other temples in Japan even that claim the same thing). But my typical luck seems to have followed me across the Pacific; we managed to pick the one temple in Kyoto that's under restoration construction work. The Founder's Hall was wrapped in a gargantuan temporary metal building to protect it during the restoration effort, and will remain as such until some time in 2011. Because of this, the Founder's Hall was closed, although we could still go on the rest of the normal tour. It was still interesting and impressive, but of course I felt that it would be quite a lot nicer without scaffolding and orange cones.

After the temple, we started going to Kyoto Station, but got distracted by a restaurant and stopped for lunch. It looked like a perfectly average noodle shop, and had a food bar on the ground floor, but since there were five of us we got seated upstairs at a traditional table. I decided I would order something I've never had, and went with ジンギスカン (jingisukan) - mutton, or, as the menu put it, barbequed ram. It was amazingly good. I neglected to take any pictures of the food, but some of the others thought of it, and I may append the day's album later.

Stomachs full, we started once again toward Kyoto Station, which is the biggest building in Kyoto and the second biggest train station in Japan. It has things like department stores, a movie theater, an amphitheatre, a bunch of restaurants, and who knows what else, in addition to being the city's central bus and train hub. I didn't know about the size of the place ahead of time, and it took me a while to figure out that the train station wasn't near what looked like a row of really big buildings, it was what looked like a row of really big buildings. It has about the same volume as Ritsumeikan's Kinugasa campus. We made the long ascent to the roof, passing alongside an amphitheatre with about 11 floors of seating, which was mostly full of people watching a high school band exhibition or competition of some sort. The roof offered pretty good views of Kyoto in most directions; after a bit of orientation I was able to pick out the school campus in the distance. The bulk of the building was also open-air. I'd like to see it in rain or snow.

After that, it was homeward bound. Alysson left her bike at the station unlocked, hoping someone will steal it before she goes back to retrieve it so that she has an excuse to buy a nicer bike, so she took the buses home. The rest of us rode. Between riding through the city and the view from the station, I have a much better sense of the size of the city and the overall character of it. Just seeing the city and riding around in the cooler weather would have been a good day; the tourist bits and the company made it even better.

Direct link to the photo album of the day