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. =)

Arashiyama and Kiyomizudera!

This past weekend I went to some of the most beautiful places in Kyoto for kouyou, or the changing leaves =) This is a pretty important time in Japan, and it was delayed this year due to global warming and whatnot, so I was actually able to go during a time when the leaves really should have all been gone. It was so beautiful! Arashiyama is a really pretty mountain with a monkey park and a bamboo path and a lot of omiyage(souvenir) shops! I ate a lot of yatsu-hashi here, a Kyoto delicacy of triangular cinnamon-mochi like thing filled with red-bean paste or a variety of different flavors. I really wanted to bring them back as omiyage, but unfortunately they expire within a week =(

Afterwards, we all went to Kiyomizudera, which is a very popular temple with a lot of great little shops leading up to it where you can sample sweets and drink tea for free! We went at night, so there were lights everywhere and my camera took a bunch of crazy pictures. And I finally got to try taiyaki! It's a grilled pancake-like thing shaped like a fish and filled with red-bean paste. I ate it at a vendor exiting Kiyomizudera, and it was delicious!
Next week is finals, so I doubt I'll be updating much =( But I hope to go to Uji(the tea district in Kyoto) really soon! I loooove Kyoto!!!