Catching Up

Blerg. So I find myself unfortunately with a bunch of pictures that don't fit together super well within the timeline of my life. So these next few posts are going to be informative and scatterbrained. Here we go:

The Japanese Bridge to Terabithia. Pretty right? It is at the Fuji springs place that we went to. 

Here you can see the koi in the natural water...thing. The coins are for wishing and it is about 50 feet deep. The water is super crystal clear, so you can see all the way to the bottom. 

Remember when we went to do that training thing at the rich guys house? This is his garden. That big tree on the right? Some fancy tree from his hometown or something. 

This is in the halls of his giant house. You can see out into the courtyard. The house is a classic representation of mansion during the Meiji Period. The Meiji Period was around the turn of the century.  

You may be asking who did this phenomenal calligraphy. You know who? Me. Yeah, that's right. As part of our orientation at the rich guy's house, we did calligraphy. You may be asking yourself, what do these professional-grade characters mean? The one on the left means summer, and the one on the right means love. I did in in remembrance of the super popular hit by one Justin Timberlake, "Summer Love." 

To be fair, that was the only song title that came up with the characters that they gave us.  

These are the ravenous fish that are in the moat-thing that surrounds the house. Neat as they may be, I think they are ugly as sin.  

Looking in from the front gate toward the house. 

Let me tell you about something else that we did. We learned proper manners for tea, bowing and sitting. That is what they called it. I called it nasty evil torture method of ankle crushing terror. 

Seiza is what this is called. Awful. We didn't have a super cool bench like this guy does. So instead, you just sit on your own ankles until they presumably crack under your weight. This went on for far too long and I would give away my feet before I would willingly submit to any more of this torture. 

After this, we learned how to get on and off the zabuton (the pillow that he is kneeling on). We practiced this method of standing up and down off these about 20 times. It was almost as awful, but at least I wasn't cracking my own ankle bones. I don't know if I have clearly articulated how much I hated this, but I really did hate sitting that way. I just don't understand a society that doesn't appreciate chairs. I would not have survived in the Meiji Period.