KANAZAWA'd!!!

So Kanazawa, in a word, owns. Tokyo was awesome, and it's certainly the more interesting place to visit, but Kanazawa seems like it will be much better for living, working, and learning. One nice thing about it is that it's not as freakin' huge. Tokyo was a touch intimidating, as well as difficult to navigate without being able to read. Kanazawa, on the other hand, is smaller and a bit more friendly, making it a great place to hold a program like PII for multiple reasons.

For one thing, the culture to be found in Kanazawa is numerous. (Hey, if my Japanese isn't getting better, my English is definitely getting worse.) The evening I arrived at the hotel, I went to sleep at 5:00, intending to take a quick nap, but woke up at 10:00 pm and ended up just sleeping through until 5:00 am. Jet lag licks balls. But I digress. That morning, I decided to walk around the city for a bit since I didn't have to meet my host parents until 11:00. From the station, if you start walking south, you pass a crapload of really nice hotels and maybe some skyscraper-esque office buildings and such. Then you hit the shopping district, chock full of these awesome 6 or 7 story department stores full of fascinating and mysterious items, plenty of convenience stores and smoke shops, and your occasional restaurant for good measure. It's around this part of town, or perhaps a bit further south, that you start running into a bunch of Jinja shrines and Buddhist temples. It's so awesome. Right in the middle of modern, busy Kanazawa, you have these peaceful little havens, built hundreds of years ago.

I visited a couple of the Shinto shrines that morning. They're always open for anyone to come in, and there are no staff guarding anything. Apparently no one worries about vandalism and other tomfoolery (now there's a 50 yen word if ever there was one...and there probably wasn't). The gardens there were beautiful, as were the altars and idols. I saw several people come to the temples and pray, and I wondered if they were just tourists like me, or if there were Japanese people who still used the ancient temples in practice and how often they did so. At both shrines, at the entrance to the temple, there were lots of little papers tied to the bushes and trees. I thought perhaps they were a type of fortune, like the kind that come in cookies, only much longer and more complex. In the temple window they had a box full of them, so I took one and tied it with the others. The shrines were so serene. I thought, “I could spend every morning like this.”

I later did some research to find out what the fortune dealies were all about. It turns out they're called “omikushi,” and the idea is that you get the fortune, and if it's good, you keep it. But if it's bad, you tie it to the bush or the tree, which will prevent it from coming true. Since I can't read much of anything, I'll just give myself the benefit of the doubt and assume that my fortune was bad and that I was correct to tie it.

There's plenty more to tell, but I'm sick of writing and you're sick of reading. More later, then.