To get my meals out of the way, since I managed to dodge dinner entirely, here’s free breakfast:

And lunch, which cost 578 yen.

Mackerel, rice, okra, pork soup, and hijiki, which is a type of seaweed. The description of the hijiki bowl on the tray was particularly memorable:

It’s just.. kind of edible.

This is what the Ritsumeikan cafeteria (the morning one, though the afternoon one looks similar) looks like:

Our classes were pretty fun, although I kind of forgot about a little bit of homework we had and thus had to do that in the five minutes before class started. It was no problem though as it was really short (and not listed on our schedule, nor were we turning it in for marks, which was why I had forgotten about it).

One standout thing that we, and apparently the other class as well, were given today was a sheet of paper with the names of body parts on one side, and set phrases to use when describing various ills and ailments to a doctor on the other side. Just in case we had to see a doctor or something I suppose. We then took turns roleplaying a quick doctor visit with each other.

The lessons jump around a lot within the chapter in the textbook — the main bulk of it is taking turns to read a short one-page passage, but as we hit a highlighted phrase or grammatical usage in the reading, the teacher pauses the passage reading and we dive into what it means and some practice exercises with the phrase, which usually takes about half an hour or so, before finally returning to the passage and continuing on where we left off. I really enjoy this method of teaching. It also probably really helped that our teacher on Thursday and Friday was the same one, Ms. Hara, so there was some continuity.

Next week, and every week really, we have Mr Katsuki Shigefumi sensei on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Ms Hara Manami sensei on Thursdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays, we have a Ms Kaneko Shouko sensei teaching us, but I have no idea who they are yet. The two teachers that I have met so far are both great and kind, though, and that’s good.

For our afternoon activity today, we took a chartered bus down to the outdoor shopping street near Kiyomizu Temple, and were led into the back rooms of a pottery workshop there named Mori Touki-kan, where we were given a piece of paper to draw the rough shape of what tableware we wanted to make on, and then a bunch of clay to match that plate, bowl, or cup. We were taught how to use our fingers to meld the various pieces together to form the shape we wanted, and then taught how to use a piece of wet leather to smoothen the tops and bottoms of the clay piece so that there would be no sharp edges once the pottery piece was fired. We didn’t get to use an electric spinning wheel like in Yakunara Mug Cup mo, an anime from a few seasons ago that I really liked, but it was still quite interesting. And I would not have been able to make a square bowl with an electric spinning wheel, which was why I opted for a non-round pattern here.

Unfortunately, there are no pictures of the clay-making process (Kiyomizu-yaki) itself because my fingers became a messy affair and my phone would have been caked in clay dust if I had tried. A picture of what I wanted to make was is here though:

And a couple pictures of the workshop here include:

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My “finished” clay bowl is the one on the far right. The reason I wanted to make that, well… these pottery projects will apparently undergo a firing process in a gas-powered kiln in the basement sometime over the next couple weeks, and the workshop will paint and glaze them according to our chosen colours, and then we’ll get the final finished pieces during our graduation ceremony if we last that long. At that point, if my piece survives, I’ll show what I did using the final product and explain what I wanted to do with it.

We were taken for a brief tour of the downstairs area too. The kiln looked like this::

And there were some great-looking ceramic lanterns made using this clay process whose method was pioneered by (and allegedly only known to) the owner of this workshop:

I brought out another postcard for everyone to sign as a small gift for the workshop host.

After this, we went to the front of Kiyomizu Temple to take a mildly illegal photo (I believe a sign said that photos on the steps are not allowed after 4 pm and we were there just after that).

And then we all disbanded and headed off our own separate ways. Zian and I went into the temple itself, paying the 400 yen entrance fee, which also netted us an entrance token that looked like a bookmark that we got to keep.

We then walked around and then found the booth doing goshuin. We both picked one up for 300 yen each.

Interestingly, this is a completely different one, not just the date and time but also location and written script, from the one that I had gotten while I was here in November, which looked like this:

Some (possibly many) temples have different “goshuin booths” open on different days and while the other one was the Hon’in Sacred Site or something (I’m still not sure of the exact translation), the one open today was from a completely different building, which I think was the Saigoku Sacred Site. Names fuzzy. We also walked around and took some pictures of the temple itself, or the people in the temple. Here’s an obligatory temple scenery picture:

I told Zian that the last time I was here, I had gotten in for free by entering the temple from the back gate. We walked there to look at the back entrance and she realized from a sign next to the large pagoda by the back entrance that the name of that pagoda actually was the same as her own Chinese name, just pronounced differently in Japanese. We were floored by that.

After that, we left the place, walking around the main street outside the temple and glancing into shops:

Picking up snacks (She bought #2, I bought #3, and we split the buns with each other):

And then figuring out a way home. After some Google Maps confusion, we walked out to a bus stop, caught it to a connecting bus stop halfway toward our Saiin Station/Nishioji Shijo bus stop, and being far more astute that I am, Zian pointed out that at least eight different buses or so from that intermediate bus stop basically went to our bus stop, which was still about 7 stops or so away. Basically all the buses, or nearly all of them, that stopped at that stop, would work to take us home.

And that was it for the day! I stopped by a Gyomu supermarket to pick up groceries for dinner and some more random thing like a sauce bottle that I wanted to try:

But I fell asleep before I could use it. Nothing there was due for expiry that night though so they just rolled over into the next day.