Japan

Hi Everyone,
What a crazy week this has been.... jam packed with events and places and interesting surprises. So, one of the English teachers at this church is Bobby...she is one of the most incredible tour guides ever!

This girl really knows her stuff, and helped me co-ordinate some of this past weeks' activities.

At the beginning of the week, I went to Keiko-sans' house for a two day homestay. She is an amazing woman, just went back to university (she's in her late fourties) and is studying linguistics. English and French... it was good to see my 'oh so rusty French' get used finally.

A bunch of us had lunch at her house (she made an incredible Korean meal) and then we hung out and talked. The next day, bright and early at 6am we met for breakfast and strolled around beautiful parks afterwards.

The next day was when the typhoon hit. I went to the airport to exchange money. Three earthquakes, one Hirshima and Miyajima later I found myself waiting for a new friend at Namba train station. A rather large station where it can be quite difficult to meet a friend - especially one you've never seen before. But all is well since we found each other and headed off to Kyoto for the day.

This is Michiko, a friend of Rhonda's from when she was living in Japan and teaching English. We went to shrines, the golden temple, a famous rock garden, more temples.. all through the Gion district and saw many beautifuil maikos - I guess the geisha don't come out during the day, they are all sleeping off the fatigue from the previous nights 'activities...

Michiko was a great hostess, she is very interesting, for a Japanese lady she doesn't think or act like the Japanese. Very much her own person.

Guess what I found last night? An  AMAZING breakdancing spot where people just showed up and danced. They even had a dance off between two groups - it was great! I grew up in Flemo in the 80's where it was all about the beat boxing, breakdancing and skateboarding, so I have a great love of the stuff....I was so excited to see such life here.

The dancers were fantastic, they did all sorts of spins, stunts, dives, etc. not much popping though. Oh how cool! I also managed to find some graffiti too.  By the way, Toronto graff is INCREDIBLE and you should definitely make an effort to find it if you find yourself in that city. And can you believe we crashed a fake wedding? That's right, a fake shinto wedding. Bobby and I were visiting a shinto shrine and the building next door happened to have a wedding show starting in half an hour.

We walked in for a break and ended up getting free desserts, drinks, being seated (like a lady I might add, where the gentleman actually pulled the chair beneath me to 'seat me properly') - oh it was great.

The food layout, the costumes, the settings, everything was fabulous. We were treated like royalty. One of the coordinators took quite a bit of time to explain the details and meaning of various items, as well as helped us fill out the questionnaire at the end - it was all in Kanji, although Bobby could read most of it. (Very impressive I might add)

It turned out that this man was a seasoned surfer (he was exceedingly sweet to us) and he learned English by himself simply by talking to people in Hawaii during his surfing trips. I tell you, people can be so interesting and surprising. He was dressed head to toe in a beautiful tux and really knew the correct mannerisms for behaving like a gentleman.

Funny, I am the least likely of all my friends to get married, yet many times I have ended up(inadvertently and totally by accident) crashing weddings, fake weddings, finding myself at bridalshows thinking it was the carpentry show etc.  Funny. Well, at least they're not baby showers! I remember the last time the bouquet toss somehow came straight for me, even though I was standing as far away from the other women as possible so as to avoid it! ha ha....
great qi to all,
YF

ps. To view more photos, click here.