Touring around Osaka: Kyoto and Arima

I'm a little sick right now and feel pretty incapable of writing, so here's a pretty picture-heavy blog post.  Last Friday, my friends and I spent the afternoon in Kyoto.  It's only about a half-hour train ride from where we live, so it was a fairly easy commute.  While in Kyoto, we toured a lovely little temple called the Ginkaku-ji.  Some images:

In Kyoto, we also saw this charming lady playing the accordion by the river:

The next day, we went to a town called Arima.  Apparently some really famous stuff happened in Arima--I guess Hideyoshi lived there?  Don't take my word for it, I was just piecing together bits of information.  Anyhow, my friend and I went to an onsen there, which is a really cool kind of public bath.  We were the only ones there, and we used lots of complimentary beauty products.  Here are some pictures from Arima:

Arima Cider is okay, but the bottle is the coolest thing about it.  This monkey was a very charming monkey, but his trainer was being very mean to him and it made us all feel really uncomfortable.

We have no classes on Monday, so hopefully we can find something GREAT to do with our three-day weekend.  First stop: Karaoke tonight.  Not a bad start.

Jya, ne...

The Best Things in Life Are Aquariums and Food

Hello friends.  I continue to live in Japan!

Okay, I know I promised that this post would be about showers, but frankly that sounds boring compared to what I did last weekend.  Know what I did last weekend?  I went to the AQUARIUM!

I freaking love aquariums.  Any old kind of aquarium is good.  But this aquarium... oh man.

This aquarium is enormous.  The biggest aquarium I've ever been to.  It was also filled with people, which was slightly frightening at times.  But mostly I was excited because the cover of the brochure proudly proclaimed "Ocean, You See Whale Shark!"

And I DID see whale shark, as well as a number of other great aquatic (and semi-aquatic) critters.  Take a look!

Oh man, I freaking LOVE aquariums.

So other than the aquarium, probably the most exciting thing I've done lately is go out for okonomiyaki with my Japanese class.  Not familiar with okonomiyaki?  Well maybe this video will help:

It's basically eggs, cabbage and other various fixin's mixed together and fried, then covered in mayonnaise and sauce.  It's pretty incredible, though I shamefully could not finish my enormous portion.  Here are some pictures of that experience:

Yummmm.

So that's basically what's been happening so far.  I hope to do something interesting this weekend as well, but it looks like there's a typhoon on the way (not a joke) so we'll see if I can actually leave my apartment.  In other news, I am now an official CET Osaka correspondent, which means that I'll be blogging for CET as well as on this blog.  Expect a link to that shortly!

Until next time!