Taruipia and Kyoto

November 6, 2014

                Taruipia festival was this past weekend and Adam had a booth at it to promote the Calgary homestay trip.  In January, Adam will be taking a group of junior high school students to Calgary to experience Canadian culture and do some touring around.  I went with him to the festival on Saturday.  Unfortunately, it rained the whole day so the park was turned into a giant mud puddle and not very many people came.  We set up a fishing for maple leafs game and drawing the northern lights activity.  The junior high school students who had gone to Canada last year helped out at the booth and ran the activities.  They had done most of the preparations by making posters about their experience in Canada and setting up the booth.  They were very helpful since they could explain to the kids what the activities were. 

                The festival had a stage set up with entertainment going on all day.  On Saturday, it was mostly dance with these other cartoon characters battling it out.  I was surprised at how many hip hop dances were performed, but I guess it’s pretty popular in Japan.  Our booth was well located as we could see the stage from our vantage point.  So this festival was a bunch of different booths, food, and entertainment.  At the end of the festival, they usually throw “mochi” into the crowd.  Mochi, we were told, is a sweet rice cake.  As the ground was a giant mud puddle the mochi was handed out in bags to people.  Adam and I lined up and got the mochi.  After supper that evening, we were both so excited to taste it.  Adam took a bite and a look of disappointment came across his face.  He offered some to me.  It wasn’t sweet at all, it seemed to just be rice puréed and put into these cute little circular cakes.  Adam brought the mochi back to the festival the next day and offered it to one of the English teachers.  She likes it and informed him that you don’t eat it plain.  You mix sugar and soy sauce together and dip the cake into that.  So far, I’ve found that Japanese sweets have excellent presentation, but I haven’t liked the taste. 

The Cartoon Characters on Stage

The Mud Puddle

Northern Lights with pastels.
It's actually harder to do than it looks.

The  leaves are starting to change colour.

                Sunday, Adam had to be at the festival the whole day again.  Meanwhile, I was invited to a Halloween party that one of my adult students was having for her students (she has a private English school in her home).  It was a pretty low key affair.  I introduced myself to the students and talked to them a little about Canada and then we played different games. 

                Monday was a national holiday for cultural day.  Adam and I decided to go to Kyoto.  It takes about an hour and a half to get to Kyoto by the slow train and one hour if you take the bullet train.  We opted for the slower train.  As it was a national holiday, the train and Kyoto were very busy.  Travelling in Europe, I always was able to sit on the trains I took between cities.  In Japan, lots of the time we have to stand or if we sit the seats aren’t together.  Luckily, we got seats.

Kyoto was the capital of Japan for 10 centuries and so there is a lot of culture, temples, and shrines.  Japanese people go to Kyoto and dress up in Kimonos and walk around getting their picture taken.  It’s great for tourists to see this traditional attire too.  I can’t understand how they can walk in the shoes though, they’re basically wooden flip flops. 

These two ladies even had their faces painted and wigs.

                We started off our day at the Fushimi Inari-taisya Shrine.  It’s a Shinto shrine with thousands of Torii gates going up the mountain.  These gates are really expensive and different people buy them and then their name is written on it.  We did the 4 km hike up and around the mountain through the Torii gates and had our lunch overlooking Kyoto. 

                After lunch, we headed off to the neighbouring temple of Tofukuji.  This temple is Buddhist and has the largest and oldest gate and meditation hall in Japan.  We looked at the things outside, but decided not to pay to go in.

The Gate

                Next was Kiyomizudera Temple.  On our walk there we passed many other smaller temples/shrines, but we opted to just go to the most famous ones since Kyoto is covered with temples and shrines.  We decided to pay to go into Kiyomizudera Temple.  The gardens of this temple were pretty big.  In future, I’ll want to try and research these places before we go since there aren’t too many signs and I read more after that explained all there is to see at the temple and what it means.  This temple was super crowded. 

                We then walked down Sannen-zaka and Ninen-zaka which are supposed to be preserved streets of Kyoto which show the old architecture.  Once again, it was incredibly crowded and reminded me a little of Banff or Jasper in the summer.  It’s basically a bunch of little shops selling souvenirs and food. 

                Our fourth temple of the day was Kodaiji Temple.  We just looked from the outside again and saw this giant Buddha.  I talked to the ladies at work about seeing this in Kyoto and neither of them had heard of it.  I don’t think it’s as famous, but it was pretty cool to just round a corner and see this giant Buddha. 

                The last temple we stopped by was Kodaiji Temple.  I’m just realizing now that we didn’t see the other really famous temple we were close to and that I thought we saw, that’s just how many temples there are. 

Our last stop was Maruyama Park.  We had our supper here as the sun set on this beautiful park.  Two models dressed in kimonos came and started to have a photo shoot right by where we were sitting. (At least it seemed like a photo shoot with 5 photographers each and them slightly altering their pose as their picture was being taken.)  Adam and decided to have our own photo shoot in this romantic garden after we finished our supper.

                We had walked all day and so wanted to take a bus back to the train station.  We boarded one, but it was so packed full that we had to stand and then it was rush hour so we decided that we could walk faster.  We got off the bus (still stuck in traffic) and walked. Needless to say, we got our fair share of exercise.

                On Tuesday night, we had our first adult English class.  Adam and I have ten sessions with this class.  The first one was just introductions, but I found it really fun.  My highlight of the night was speaking to one of the students in French.  J