Okay, here I am with another blog update! It's getting near the end of our stay here in Japan, and it's kind of a sad thing... it feels like there's still so many things we want to do, and things about Japanese lifestyle to continue enjoying, but here we are in the last month. =( That being said, a month's a lot of time to have a blast, so hopefully I'll have some exciting stuff to end this blog with a bang! But enough talk about the end - how about I talk about what I've been up to in the about-a-month between updates?
I'll start with the sort of fun and not so fun part - school. On one hand, the end of the semester means everyone's favorite part - final papers/exams. =( It's actually not that bad for me... 2 papers in English, 1 (short) paper in Japanese and a 20-minute presentation in Japanese on it, and 1 exam in a history class. I wouldn't complain too much about it, but it does take time which cramps on time I want to spend enjoying stuff in Japan that I hadn't gotten around to 'til now. Technically it's my fault for procrastinating on them so much, but I'm still a little sad at the workload regardless.
Okay, how about a cool thing? Of course, this cool tidbit comes from Anime and Video Game culture class, this time some video game related stuff! We actually started the video game portion of the class a few weeks back, but it's mostly just been lectures on the industry's history in Japan, so it wasn't too scintillating of stuff. This recent week though, we had a guest speaker: [name], president of the company that brought to you such unique DS titles as Cooking Mama! His talk concerned game production - history, way of thinking, and present state! It's super text heavy, so like the last guest speaker talk, I'll put it in an additional post so as to not clog this one post with too much text walls.
Go here for interested people! ->
So what else have we been up to this past month? Lots of sightseeing! The first one I'll talk about is Odaiba: An artificial island developed from cannon fortresses that the Japanese built in an attempt to hold back the foreigners trying to open Japan to the world during the 1860s! It's not really anything like a historic site anymore though, and is now more of a rather popular tourist location. The island sports a lot of shopping centers and museums, and a number of cool sights! This time we went, we mainly checked out a particular shopping mall that was mainly important because it had... this guy!
This here, is the 1:1 scale model Gundam that you may have heard about before. It's really awesome, and quite worth the trip - also its eyes light up at night! Anyways, it was pretty amusing seeing Japanese tourists equally as hype about the big 'ol RX-78. Other than that, the mall actually had some sweet shops! We went to a traditional goods store, and I bought a fan and some bento boxes. They look really neat. =3
So the other fun one we did was go to a place called Palette Town, which featured a gamecenter of sorts, and the 2nd largest Ferris Wheel in Japan, standing at 117m in height! The gamecenter was mostly fun because we decided to try out purikura, Japanese picture booths that are a popular group activity among Japanese girls in particular (funny fact - a male can't use them unless in a party with a female). Anyways, they have absolutely hilarious poses and photo editing effects, so we had a hell of a blast with that one. Maybe I'll post pictures, but they're almost embarrassing how ridiculous they are lol.
Anyways, aside from that, let's talk about the ferris wheel! It was really tall. Like, "oh right, I'm kinda afraid of heights, oh fuuuuuu" kind of really tall. The view was super pretty, and as all ferris wheels are, a lovely romantic opportunity, so I think it was quite worth it - $5 for a 15-minute ride I think? Oh, they also offered couple photos at one point in the line. They really know their marketing, but well, it worked, admittedly. ^^;
So that's it for Odaiba this time - there were tons of things to do there, and some things we wanted to do that we didn't get around to, so I'll be talking about that one again next time, for sure. Particularly, they have an onsen theme park, and I'm super hype for that, so if you're interested, stay tuned for next time! Either way though, next on the list of places is Kamakura - an area of Tokyo that used to be a government center, but now is known for its abundant shrines and temples, and other tourist attractions.
The main highlight of Kamakura was the shrine visit! As avid anime-watchers or Japanese culture enthusiasts among you may know, there's quite a few customs and traditions associated with Shinto shrines, so it was a pretty surreal experience, getting to partake in some of them. But first, pictures!
So what'd we do there? I think the one most worth pointing out in particular was omikuji. Omikuji, for those who don't know, is a custom of taking slips of paper from the shrine marked with varying degrees of luck, and giving fortunes for various aspects of life, such as exams, love life, dreams and aspirations, and health. For my part, I got "chuu-kishi", which is just below Great Luck according to Wiki's chart, so that's awesome. Though I'm almost disappointed I didn't get misfortune, because I sorta wanted to tie the fortune to a tree branch (basically a tradition where if you get bad luck, you tie it to a tree branch so it stays with the tree and doesn't stick to you).
Those two were the two major sightseeing days among the last month. Other points of interest (and by of interest I mean, things I have pictures of) besides those include Ikebukuro, Gundam Cafe, and karaoke! I'll let the pics speak for themselves. And the captions lol.
(here's some more stuff and assortment)
Well, that wraps it up for this update! As mentioned in the beginning of the post, we only have a little less than a month left, so the next post will probably the last one! That being said, there's still lots of stuff we wanna do left, so I expect that last post to be appropriately action and picture packed! 'Til then!
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