Now that things are starting to slow down, I\u2019m beginning to find a rhythm. I feel at home here for the most part, and I\u2019m starting to try things that I never would have tried in America. I have some kind of event written down almost every week until December, so I\u2019m rarely bored.<\/p>\n
For example, I took a trip last weekend with my Pop Culture class to the Okinawan Eisaa Matsuri and got my first taste of real traditional Japanese culture. Okinawan people used to be considered barbaric because they didn\u2019t adhere to the more modern standards that the rest of Japan was adapting to, so the people became ashamed of their heritage and were afraid to practice it. However, a group of young people started this festival as a way to celebrate Okinawan culture, and it continues to this day. It was wonderful to see everyone coming together and watching dances and songs at the center of food stands and picnics. I even got to try yakisoba and see parents teaching one of the dances to their toddler, who could only bounce and wobble in response.<\/p>\n
However, the heat was intense and one of our friends started to feel the effects of heat exhaustion, and yet again I was surprised by the kindness of the Japanese people. A family allowed her to rest on their mat in the shade and immediately a woman (who just happened to be a nurse) came to her side and began to help her. Other families joined her until our friend was too crowded for our group to stay near her, and we moved off to the side to let them take care of her. After she began to feel better, the nurse brought us shaved ice and the family whose mat she rested on asked us to take a picture with them. The man who had brought her to the mat in the first place \u2013 one of the people who was working backstage at the festival \u2013 stayed with us during the long ordeal and remained cheerful the entire time. Although it was a nerve-wracking experience to begin with, the people were too kind for us to stay anxious for long.<\/p>\n
Then, on Thursday, our Seminar House held a \u6708\u898b (tsukimi \u2013 moon-watching) event on the rooftop. We all gathered and looked up at the cloudy sky while drinking green tea and eating rice cakes, and after a while of intense patience, we finally got to see the moon peek through the clouds. I love watching the sky, so this was a much-appreciated event for me.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, I went to Amemura with a few of my friends, and it was an interesting experience. Amemura is short for America-mura, so there were a lot of funny American T-shirts (including one of Goku from Dragon Ball Z dabbing), but there were also a lot of cool pop-culture hotspots as well. We looked through Lolita fashion shops and thrift shops, as well as little game arcades and restaurants, and even spent a few hours in a used anime\/manga store called Mandarake. It was a small section of the city, but it had some wild attractions \u2013 including the tallest ice cream cones I\u2019ve ever seen and artfully sculpted cotton candy.<\/p>\n
And lastly, on Sunday, I went to a shopping center in Osaka called Umeda with a Japanese friend I made during my trip to Kyoto \u2013 Aya — and her friend Yuka. We went to the Studio Ghibli store, the Pokemon Center, an okonomiyaki (akin to Japanese omelets) restaurant, and a little snack section of the mall. Aya insisted on buying things to let me try them, but didn\u2019t want to let me buy anything for either of them \u2013 this, I suppose, is a part of Japanese hospitality. According to her, it was my time abroad, and I shouldn\u2019t spend money on either of them (no matter how hard I tried to treat them in return).<\/p>\n
As if the kindness of the Japanese people and the amazing places I\u2019ve traveled to weren\u2019t enough, I can see that the trees are beginning to change color. Having lived in Florida my whole life, I\u2019ve never really experienced seasons before and I\u2019m excited to see how beautiful Japan will become when the weather starts to cool down and the trees are painted with a myriad of Fall colors. Amidst all the intense heat and humidity, we\u2019ve already seen a couple of typhoons, so the cool weather will certainly be a welcome change.<\/p>\n
Until then, I\u2019ll be studying hard!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now that things are starting to slow down, I\u2019m beginning to find a rhythm. I feel at home here for the most part, and I\u2019m starting to try things that I never would have tried in America. I have some kind of event written down almost every week until December, so I\u2019m rarely bored. For…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kansai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16224,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions\/16224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}