It was showering rain all morning and afternoon today, so for the morning, I borrowed an umbrella from my rental apartment lobby and went off to meet Zian at 7:45 am as usual. We went to the cafeteria today to get our breakfast, since it was too much trouble to wait around for the convenience shop to open at 8:30 am and then figure out how and where to stay dry while eating before 9:00 am rolls around. We did visit the convenience store AFTER eating, though, so that Zian could pick up lunch in the form of a wrapped sandwich, and I could pick up a pack of sticky notes, which I needed for labelling my receipts and brochures (I label them by daily chunks), as the sticky pad that I had brought had run out.

Class today was mediocre. We started a new chapter of the textbook today, so it seems that we were supposed to read ahead at the essay at the start of every chapter, which I did do, but also that we were supposed to look at the vocabulary list and start to memorize or understand that or something, which I just don’t have the time to do. We did that in class the last two chapters, so I don’t really know why this chapter was being treated differently. Oh well.  One thing I do appreciate is learning new words and phrases and then immediately seeing it appear on posters or books or something when exploring the city. For example, I saw this sign at Kyoto Station earlier today:

It’s a collaboration poster for the City of Kyoto, and the xxxHOLiC anime, which Satinel, Nak, and I watched a couple of months ago as a group watch pick of Satinel‘s. What’s particularly cool about it though is the phrase up top, which reads 京都を好きにならずにいられない, or “Kyoto o suki ni narazu ni irarenai”. And “zu ni irarenai”, which was a grammar phrase completely unknown to me before today, was something we actually learnt today in class that means “can’t not (verb)”, so the sentence basically translates to “I can’t not fall in love with Kyoto” or (somewhat less literally) “I can’t help but fall in love with Kyoto”. And that grammar piece itself builds off of ず, or zu, which turns the preceding verb into a negative and is a term is from old Japanese — right out of my Classical Japanese class from last semester! So all that immediately paying off was super cool.

But anyway I’m getting ahead of myself. First, we had lunch. This was my lunch:

Curry rice, and fish. Because it was raining, and I think because no one really had the energy to play mentor to the new students on top of having to keep up with Buddy conversations, only Zian and I even attended the lunchtime Buddy chat sessiion, out of the 8 people in our cohort. A bunch of the other students from Case Western were there, as well as a few Buddies, but the rest of our cohort either left for sushi at a nearby restaurant, or ate at the cafeteria and then went straight back to their hotel. I do not blame them one bit. Although we did make a friend in Lauren yesterday, Ritsumeikan should really not be mixing up these groups and Mr Tanaka should not have asked us to mentor the other incoming new students too like he did two days ago. That’s literally Ritsumeikan‘s (and/or the Buddies’) jobs, to put it bluntly, and we already pay overpriced fees to our University to come here to learn from a weird turnable of teachers that I’m not fully convinced even want to be here. Zian and I ignored the other new students anyway, though mostly because we organically settled at different tables in the classroom we use for lunches, rather than because we dislike them or anything, and we chatted to one Buddy whose name I never really caught all the way through lunch, before parting and leaving on our own.

Zian and I looked around for a bit while deciding what to do — we didn’t really want to visit temples in the rain, and there was no one particular option that stuck out above the rest. After some time of researching things to do on our phone, we angled toward trying to look for stamp rallies, and I found what seemed to be an advertisement about some sort of stamp rally/mystery game thing involving taking buses or trains to different parts of Kyoto, which started at Kyoto Station, so we went over there by bus to take a look at it.

We never really did find much more about this mystery game thing — we did find the bus ticket counter where we supposedly could start it at, but it (supposedly) cost 2,500 yen to get the information book on it, and there were actually no advertisements or samples or anything out at the ticket counter so we were a bit loathe to ask. We had also found a separate one at the Tourist Information Center in Kyoto Station that featured going around by trains and solving puzzles, and that one was free, but that one didn’t specifically involve collecting stamps, and we realized that the 2,500 yen one likely didn’t either. We didn’t want to put down that sort of money for something we might not be able to solve at all due to language barriers either way, so we left that alone. We did each take a copy of the information brochure for the free train one though, just in case we have time to burn over the next week or two.

In the meantime, since we were already at Kyoto Station, we just spent some time walking around there instead. There sure were a lot of people taking shelter from the on-again, off-again rain there. On top of the usual steady stream of tourists and locals passing through the station, there were also a lot of students:

We stopped at a place called Boulangerie Patisserie Grandir at the underground Porta Mall, which was a bakery where you could pick up some bread and then sit down at a table restaurant-style and chew on it. That was a cool experience.

Although for Zian, it was a spicy experience, as one of her two buns had curry in it. She doesn’t like being friends with spicy stuff, so I traded her my cylindrical bun (yuzu and what she thinks was cantaloupe) for it, and we were both happy (since I don’t particularly like cantaloupe but only had one small bite of it anyway before we traded buns).

We then walked around a bit more, ogling at bookshops and Japanese ChatGPT books and jewelry shops and other food shops. I think we enjoyed each other’s company (at least I hope the feeling was mutual) so we didn’t actually have to DO anything, we just wandered the mall for a bit, and I showed her the Isetan underground food market where Akira had taken me to buy food a couple times at just over 6 months ago. We then headed on home — Zian tried to get me to accompany her to a karaoke place but one place we tried had too long of a wait and the other place was too expensive after 6 pm, and we had reached there at 6:07 pm, so we decided that it was not to be tonight.

We called it an evening there and I went home to do my laundry. I had soup this evening, using up the rest of my groceries from — geez, Day 5 and some leftover rice from Day 6. It was still fine though, assuming my blog posts continue past today.