Rice and Ramen

Day 2 started out with waking up much too early in order to be on time for breakfast at 7, which was another mammoth example of traditional Japanese food: there was rice, soup, fish to grill yourself, soft tofu, salad, an egg, and six small bites of tsukemono (literally pickled things). When we left from the ryokan, the staff members lined up as they had when we arrived and waved at us until our buses were out of sight. Even though it was raining, they just took umbrellas and still stood there.  Just like yesterday, before returning to Kanazawa we stopped at some more cultural locations.  Stop 1: Wajima Morning Market I didn't take any pictures here because it was raining. The market is a street that has vendors that sell everything from wajima lacquer-ware, food, etcetc. It's a rather famous market with an extensive history, but since I had nothing I wanted to buy I mostly dozed in the bus, nice and dry. Stop 2: Wajima Lacquer-ware Museum Also didn't...

Bear with me now people, this post is going to be a marathon! Bright and early on Sunday morning all 47 PII students plus accompanying teachers and staff piled into two charter buses and set off for Noto--the northern region of Ishikawa. Before arriving at our ultimate destination--a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) complete with hot springs--we stopped at various cultural locations. Stop 1: Myojoji Myojoji is a Buddhist temple that was founded in the 1200s by a man named Nichizo. None of the current buildings are quite that old, but they were all constructed around the 1600s, including the temple's most famous building: a five-story, 35m tall pagoda. Random building in the temple complex I found attractive. Me in a snazzy new T-shirt in front of the pagoda. I also confess I spent a fair amount of time chasing frogs around and trying to get good photos of them, instead of looking at the buildings...what can I say, I like amphibians. Stop 2:　Keta Taisha Shri...

A few days ago, my friend Arlia (who I went to the Noh museum with) asked me if I wanted to go see a special exhibit with her on Saturday. Since her host mom had kindly provided tickets I said sure, and we made plans to meet up at the base of Kenrokuen at noon. The exhibit was a special exhibit of kaga yuzen dying (one of the 36 Ishikawa crafts) kimonos and obi (belts) at the Ishikawa Prefecture Museum of Art. The kimono were absolutely exquisite. Arlia and I were both drooling over the detailed dying (which is all done by hand, by the way). While we were filling out a survey that the staff handed us, a well-dressed man in a suit came up and asked us some questions about our opinions about the kimono. Questions like, what, as foreigners, seems most "Japanese," did we like modern or traditional designs best, which was our favorite etcetc. Turns out he was actually one of the creators of one of the kimono, a yellow one with a detailed setting of a festival along the back...

Today was a very busy day. After our normal morning of classes we were all hustled onto a charter bus (without much time for lunch) and driven to Izumigaoka High School (coincidentally it's the high school that's a ten minute walk from my house so the bus ride there was immensely familiar to me). It was pretty much your standard Japanese high school building, but apparently it's one of the largest and also smartest high schools in the city? Anyways, we were escorted into a room where desks had been pushed together to form groups of tables. There were students sitting at each table, and we were assigned specific table numbers to sit at. No one was able to tell us what we were actually going to DO there, but it definitely looked like some sort of conversation seminar thing. To me they all looked very young...they were only 16! Was I ever 16? The first half of the session was in English, and we had a short discussion (which was fairly difficult to conduct since the...

So today I got to try another art project through PII at which I had decidedly more success with than pottery. Together with PII we walked from Rifare to Higashi Chaya (about a 25 minute walk...I don't know why they didn't have us take a bus?) to a gold-leafing store. We were escorted into a back room where there were tables set up with these supplies: A box cutter, a ruler, masking tape, a rubber mat, and a pair of chopsticks. The process for making a pair of gold-leaf chopsticks was fairly simple. You first use the masking tape to block out a part of the top of the chopstick. Whatever is covered by tape won't be covered by the gold leaf in the end. So we all went to work cutting the masking tape and sticking it onto the chopsticks. Most people did some variation of stripes or swirls (it's easiest to cut masking tape into stripes hahaha) and I ended up with a pattern like this: After painting the top of the chopsticks with some kind of glue and letting them ...

So for the past few days, my host family's middle child who lives in Nagoya and works as a massage therapist came to visit for a few days. She was nice-- a little quiet, but kind-- but I didn't see much of her since I had school and she also had some work to do here at a spa or something in Kanazawa. But I had us take a "family portrait" before she left today: From left to right: Naoko with Cocoa, Me, Nobuko, and Ryuichi. Then my host parents took me to a place just on the edge of the mountains where there were fields and fields of irises. There were something like 20 different varieties of irises...it's been raining fairly hard these last three days so some of the flowers were bent over, but the ones that were standing were vibrant from the rain and covered with water droplets. The air was fresh and it was lovely--reminded me more of spring than summer. Then I went back to the Higashi Chaya district that Ryo and I went to briefly at the end...

Today it rained. Which was unusual in only that it was usual: though it's the rainy season it has only rained a handful of days. It did mean that I had to take an umbrella for once when I went to visit the Museum of Traditional Arts and Crafts, which is located inside Kenrokuen. Even though it was raining, the park was still full of tour groups, their umbrellas splotches of color against a grey sky. There are 36 crafts that are designated as "developed in Ishikawa" and the museum had stunning examples (mostly modern, which was lovey to see how these traditions have continued into the present day). Kaga embroidery and yuzen silk dying. Kaga paper stencils Washi paper...gods I drooled over this. I have no idea what I'd even use it for, but it's feather light and just so pretty... And by far one of my favorites, decorative fishing flies. They have practical uses as well (i.e. you an fish with them) but then they're made into the most beautiful...