The Return to Kyoto...CIEE style

I revisited Kyoto with CIEE, my study abroad program. It was a lot of fun.
Yesterday we got up at an ungodly hour to meet at Sophia at 7:30 in the morning. That was shitty, I had to get up at like 5:30, and the director was late. Long shinkansen ride to Kyoto. After dropping stuff off at our hotel, we were sent out to do a lame-ass “research” project. No one of my friends took this seriously, so we just walked around and bullshitted however we could. I originally told them I was going to do Sanjusangendo, which is a temple place where they have 1,000 statues, but I got lazy and I didn’t feel like going off by myself, so I changed it. I decided to do “shrines” (aka, what everyone else was doing because it was easy). Basically this consisted of going to a shrine and approaching an old lady and being like “What’s this?” She was happy to tell us, then she was like “Oh, you are so good at Japanese! And you’re beautiful!” That was a little strange. Some friends did a combined “architecture of temples” BS project. Another did “Sakura,” which was kind of hard to get anything from just walking around. Another did “people at temples,” which consisted of her taking a tally of 5 people and saying what age range they were in. “Most people who go to temples are older women. But there are older men too. And also some younger men. And there were some younger women as well. I saw some kids, too.”
Another friend did “food.” So we ate. When we were restaurant browsing, we were looking in the display windows with the plastic food displays that most places have. Lots of weird shit along the street. At one of them, I was looking really close up, and a sneeze snuck up on me, so I kind of sprayed the display glass. That was embarrassing. I had to turn my back to it and slowly move back and forth to get the spit off. It actually looked nicer afterward though, they should thank me.
Afterward, we went to some coffee shop where we sat around for like 2 hours, pretending to do “research.” I actually took a photo of a shop called research to make myself feel better. We went to this temple made specifically for birth-praying. A friend translated the name to: “Easy birth. Pray for it.”
We walked along a really pretty river, where these Japanese people were sitting on each other like they were having sex. We thought we saw a crab, because it was going upstream, but it turned out to be a plastic bag. Also, a friend punched a little Japanese kid in the face by accident. We finally made it to the shrine where we were to meet the rest of CIEE, and we ventured over to this traditional restaurant where we had a kind of gross meal, and where we shared our “research.” Some of the presentations were so hilarious. It was obvious a lot of people bullshitted on the spot. When they called on this one girl, she said “I’m tired…” so she didn’t end up going. I laughed at that for a long time.
Finally, we went off to Gion, where I went before with my dad. This time, we went to this horrible show specially geared towards tourists, where they basically crammed all Japanese culture into 30 minutes. Afterward (by this point we were all dead), we participated in a tea ceremony. It was very intricate.
Finally, we returned to the hotel, where I bought some coffee and watched some bad J-Dramas in my hotel room. It made me feel good about my Japanese, because I could understand most of it, since it was pretty simple and dumb. And for some reason, shot with a fish-eye lens, which looks ridiculous when people’s faces are on the side of the screen.
I got up around 7 the next morning, and we went to participate in “Zazen meditation,” which I prefer to call “Zazen Torture.” We sat in this freezing cold room with our socks off, sitting in a horribly uncomfortable position, meditating, while a monk went around the room smacking us with his big stick and banging loud-ass blocks together. I was not relaxed at all, I must say.
Finally we went back to a temple and ate octopus balls (that is, balls with octopus inside, not actual octopus’ balls…do they have balls?) and basically complained for about 45 minutes about the lack of trash cans in Japan. WTF Japan, it doesn’t make SENSE. So we had to carry all of our trash around with us. We also got chocolate covered frozen bananas, which were delicious!
Finally, we went back to Kyoto Station to wait for our walking tour (again, around the Gion area). That was pretty cool, though. We saw lots of Sakura and some love hotels. We actually saw a fair amount of Maiko or Geisha, not sure which. We saw like…5 or 6 probably. It was pretty cool. I got some nice photos of them.
Finally, some of us (my friend Mikka and I) returned to Kyoto Station to go back to Tokyo (some stayed in Kyoto). Somehow, even though we were with CIEE, we managed to get separated, and then as we were on the platform, Mikka was like “The train’s leaving!” So she hopped on, and I said “I don’t think that’s our train” but it was too late. So I hopped on as well and the door closed behind me. And indeed, it was not our train. So there was this whole big fiasco, where we had to explain to the train crew, and also find a way to track down our program directors so they wouldn’t wait for us and miss their train. It worked out last minute, luckily, and we actually got to sit in the first-class seats. The train crew were super nice, and kind of creepily efficient. They contacted our group, and they wrote us this whole set of directions in addition to sending one of their train ladies to take us through Tokyo station once we arrived. She was actually kind of eerily nice. She totally walked like a robot, in a very specific way. We were discussing how she must have been trained to walk that way, moving her arms in perfect motions as she walked. And her pace was always consistent, she never sped up or slowed down. And when we got to stairs/escalators, she would say “Please take the escalator, you must be tired. I will take the stairs.” There was plenty of room on the escalator, but she always took the stairs, like to show us that we were above her. And she walked in that weird way down the stairs as well. And then when she got us to our exact platform, she was like “please wait inside here. I am so sorry that we caused you all of this trouble” as if WE didn’t walk onto the wrong train and cause THEM all the trouble. Anyway, it was weird.
While we were waiting for CIEE to get there, we heard all these Japanese people going crazy and shouting what sounded like army march songs or something. Apparently, someone was moving, so all of their colleagues came out. They were all “Banzai! Banzai!” And raising there arms. Well maybe not banzai, but something similar.
But my train troubles had not ended! Back at Tokyo station, someone had inconsiderately killed themselves on my train line AGAIN, so I had to take a really roundabout way back home, which sucked. But I was psyched to discover they finished the renovations in my train station, so we now have a Starbucks again! Woot woot!