I finished with caligraphy class today. It was both interesting and annoying at the same time. The teacher showed us where a lot of hirigana and katakana came from. It was also neat to try my hand at doing some caligraphy at the same time. The annoying part came in that Japanese caligraphy just doesnt look right when done with the left hand. I can try to compensate for this by writing everything backwards(Which I tend to do anyway in English when writing characters), and it works for some of the kana characters, but my Kanji just dont really look right. Ahh well...
I did get YC to do some kanji caligraphy for me, which does look really good. I guess it helps to grow up with the stuff...:)
Sending out 19 post cards is a royal pain in the butt. Ugh. At least its over now....
Another neat thing about Kyoto:
A geisha who is under 20 years old is called a Miko(Mika, something like that). However, it has become popular with younger ladies in Kyoto to dress up like this and walk around the temple district. So you can see young ladies in traditional kimonos, with the face painted up traditionally, and the hair done traditionally. I thought this was really cool. I had my picture taken with some of them :). Its also really nice to go to the old temples when they are around. It makes it feel so much more traditional.
I think Kyoto was by far the most interesting Japanese city that I have gone too. To put things in perspective, 1/3 off all the pictures I have taken in Japan are from Kyoto. Now this may drop to 1/4(I need to go buy some more film), but its still really impressive considering the fact that I only spent 2 days in Kyoto.
Kyoto itself is an interesting mix of old and new. There are some really modern shopping centers, and not 5 mins. away you can go to a temple that has been there forever(Or, well..Forever by American standards).
I really enjoyed going to all the different temples, shrines, and the one castle I managed to go too. I was also really lucky that they had two temples open during the nighttime with lighting to make it look really nice. The temples were all really impressive as well. I think one of the ones we visited is the world's largest wooden structure. They must have all coasted fortunes to make.
I also really enjoyed going to a museum about the Meji Revolution. They had a map of Kyoto with super deformed characters showing people what happened. It was neat to see I walked by a place where the Shinsen Gumi assassinated someone.
Seeing so much Shinsen Gumi things was also not something I was expecting. For people who dont know about the Shinsen Gumi this link has some of its history:
http://members.fortunecity.com/roninanime/ronin_shinsengumi.htm
It is however something I really enjoyed. Even if half of the Shinsen Gumi things I saw were Shinsen Gumi Doriamon, or Shinsen Gumi Hello Kitty.
