Uji!

Woooooooooot, finals are OVER! To celebrate, I went to Uji with a few friends! Uji is a city in the outskirts of Kyoto which is famous for tea! It's also the setting for much of The Tale of Genji and it houses the Byodoin Buddhist temple from the Heian period. It's so pretty! There are a host of nice tea shops leading to the temple which offer free samples of tea and tea-related products. It really is a great place for omiyage shopping ^^ Before we went to Byodoin, I had the most delicious green tea soft-serve with match powder topping for only 250 yen!

Byodoin is..... very pretty....on the outside at least. I love temples, but this one had too much of a museum feel, and all the statues were in glass, and I frankly don't think it was worth the 600 yen it cost to enter. But they sold cheap o-mamori(good luck charms), so it wasn't a waste of a trip. And a few of the people who had taken art history found it to be really amusing, so maybe I'm just weird. But it didn't feel as spiritual as the other temples and shrines I've visited so far. Oh well.
I'm so excited classes are over! I'll be back in the states in less than a week... so weird! I just hope next semester goes as well as this one did. =)