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A Summer in Japan
My Chemistry Research Internship at Hiroshima University

 

      Monthly Archives: June 2013

      Craziness in Kyoto

When trying to describe what my trip to Kyoto was like, the first thing that comes to mind is Disney World – 928345729357 things to do but not enough time to do even a third of them. Because of this frustrating phenomenon, I have made the only logical decision one could make in my position. I have vowed to return! I don’t care if it’s in three week or twenty years – I WILL be returning to Kyoto!

My travel companions this week consisted of two girls and two boys – Fanny, Lorena, Stephan, and Beppino. Fanny is from the western part of France and is currently working on her master’s degree in theoretical chemistry. If you recall from one of my earlier posts, she is the first international student that I met on this trip and since then we have made an almost daily ritual of going to Mermaid Cafe at three o’ clock to talk about girly things and duke out our cultural differences…such as the fact that penguins are birds that live at the South Pole and cannot fly, not flying birds that live at the North Pole. Sorry France, but I’ve gotten Spain, Italy, and Honduras to back America up on that one. You may think that you have us Americans beat with your superior food quality, but you will NEVER beat us in animal classification!!!

Ahem.

Stephan is from Germany, also has his bachelor’s degree in chemistry, and is now working on his master’s degree in sustainable development. Beppino is in the same master’s program as Stephan, but has his bachelor’s in physics and is from Austria. Finally, Lorena is working on her economics degree at Hiroshima University. She is originally from Paraguay but has lived in both Wisconsin and Japan and is fluent in all three languages.

Our trip began when Fanny, Stephan, Beppino, and I (Lorena was supposed to meet up with us later) arrived at Saijo Station at 11:00 PM to take an all night bus we had priorly reserved to Kyoto. However, only minutes before the bus was supposed to arrive, we got a phone call stating that the bus was delayed and would actually be arriving around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. Not wanting to pay the bus fare to return to the university, we decided to wait for the overnight bus and bum around Saijo for the next three to four hours. To my surprise, the delay turned out to be rather enjoyable as my travel mates and I really started to get to know each another – and each other’s cultures. Over the course of the weekend we basically hit every subject from religion to politics and everything in between, and Thursday night was no exception. A favorite recurring topic turned out to be the differences in pronunciation and root words in our languages. Fanny about died when she heard my pronunciation of “Notre Dame” in reference to the American university, Stephan about died when he heard my pronunciation of “orangutan”, and I about died when I learned about the German language’s lack of euphemisms. I was also interested to discover that “race” and “ethnicity” hold very different meanings in Germany and how the former is never used in polite society. Finally, I found it rather funny how intrigued Fanny, Stephan, and Beppino were by the Greek system at American universities. Apparently, there is no analogous system in Europe, so I had a lot of fun talking about rush, swap parties, and the like.

Returning back to my Thursday night, the overnight bus finally showed up and we arrived at Kyoto Station sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 AM the next morning. I found Kyoto Station to be very different from Tokyo Station, but really liked the aesthetic.

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We also stumbled upon some adorable school children taking a tour . . . and probably got a little overzealous in our picture taking of such an ordinary event.

 

After taking a morning nap, we biked half an hour to Arashiyama, a small city filled with bamboo forests, temples, and gardens. Although it had begun drizzling at this point, we decided to risk staying outdoors a little longer and visited Tenryu-ji Temple. Not only were the temples and garden extremely peaceful, but it was equally fun people watching. There were a number of Japanese couples that had come to tour the temple in their traditional dress, and we took the liberty of taking pictures.

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