Bicycle Universe

Yesterday was just the day that I needed. I had just begun to ask myself, what am I doing in this country? Several things began to fall into place. 

Firstly, Japanese review class was the easiest so far this week. I am continually becoming more and more confident with my speaking ability of this crazy language. Today I had part 1 of placement testing, the oral interview. I think it went pretty well, the conversation was smooth, but I didn't use any impressive or advanced grammar. Tomorrow is the written placement test, and whatever class I place into is probably where I belong. No matter what, I will know Japanese a lot better at the end of this year than I do now. 

After lunch, I had a few hours to kill before class, so I rented a bike from the AKP office. This is a free and painless process, and I am always looking for reasons to chat with the office staff. On a whim I chose bike number 11, I signed the rental form, I got a bike lock key, went downstairs, unlocked the bike, put my backpack in the basket, and off I went. OH MAN!!! Biking in Kyoto is sort of scary, but my bike hour was incredible. Biking is really the best way to explore this city. It is so flat, and everyone rides bikes, and the sidewalks are so wide... It's too big to properly explore by foot, and of course I'm not driving. The trains and subways are really great, but limiting. They go a lot of places I want to go, but not everywhere. When I figure out the buses I think I will be really set. Today after the oral interview I took off on bike again for maybe an hour and 45 minutes. Who even knows where I went? Down a street, turn left, keep going, turn left again somewhere, keep going, find the river, bike along the river.... for a while I played a really fun game I made up called Bike Stalker, which is exactly what it sounds like. Every so often the person I would be following would turn and I would keep going until I found another bicycle to follow. It is so easy to ride bike!! I want to start taking bicycle excursions in the middle of the day to shrines and temples near Doshisha. 

After Bicycle Hour, I had my first Japanese Landscape Gardens class. This is going to be an amazing class. Every class section from now on is a field trip to a different garden somewhere in Kyoto. I will have to draw sketches and write a few pages on the sense-qualities that resonated with me for each place we visit. We read an excerpt from a Tom Brown Jr. book discussing how to experience moments with all five senses (naturally I was the only one in the class that had heard of or read anything by Tom Brown Jr.). We also received a supplementary class bibliography and I was pleased to see that A Pattern Language was first on the list. (If I had known it was in the AKP library, though, I probably wouldn't have schlepped my copy all the way from California). 

To really complete my day, I went to a Taiko dojo last night. A friend in the program's host mom used to (or still does? I couldn't really follow a lot of what was said at the dojo) play with them, and the three of us went to watch their practice. I didn't think I would be able to play, but they allowed me to join them for the first 40 minutes when they were doing drills and stuff. It was so fun, and felt so natural, but also incredibly difficult. After, they were rehearsing some songs, and this looked even harder. I thought the group would be mostly really fit Japanese guys, so I was surprised to see that this demographic was only a small percent of the 20 members. The majority of people there was tiny old Japanese women!!! What?!?! Hopefully, they will allow me to continually practice with them. They are deciding at a meeting on Tuesday. If I join, I will need to take it seriously and go every week. But this should be no problem. 

Today on my bike journey I stopped at a 100yen store (like a dollar store) and bought an 80-pack of origami paper. I found some colored pencils in my desk, and I have begun work on an undefinable year-long art project...

The past few days my friends and host mom have been trying to figure out how to buy concert tickets to see both Radiohead and Sigur Ros at different venues in Osaka. Buying concert tickets in Japan is one of the strangest things I have yet had to experience. It's on par with filling out forms at the ward office. There is a chain of convenience stores called Lawson's, sort of like the Japanese 7/11 (although they also have that here). So, to buy concert tickets, you have to order them over the phone, and then pay for them and pick them up from any Lawson's. But the ordering over the phone is way more complex than it needs to be. Sooner or later, I will have some concert tickets though, which is just another answer to the question, what am I doing in this country?