Me either.
And that has nothing to do with today.
Today was our 4th and penultimate (2nd to last) day trip to Nikko.
Nikko, in case you are unfamiliar with Japanese geography, is about 2 hours away on train (one way).
I dunno if it was because of that but...
More Japanese students came along!
In total, it was 5 people that came along.
Kiyoto, Ikki, Kotarou, Ikumi, and Mana (new addition, but also not pictured, sorry) came with us to Nikko!
We took a subway in the morning.
It was rush hour.
NOT fun.
It was no exaggeration to say that sardines probably had more room than us.
Maybe a little exaggeration.
But it was PACKED.
None of us could move, and we didn't even bother to hold the handrails since the people kept us in place.
I was afraid my camera would get crushed so I held my bag above my head all the way to Asakusa.
When we got to our stop, we transferred to a train that would take us pretty much close to Nikko (where we would have to switch once more to a shorter train).
The train ride was freaken awesome.
I sat next to Kiyoto (and yes that's how you spell his name in Romaji, I checked with him).
He helped me figure out the entire alphabet twice and helped me with basic Japanese.
I caught him yawning and I asked him in Japanese (or tried to) if he was tired.
He said yes, so I told him that he should sleep, so he did.
Meanwhile, the countryside outside was a breath of fresh air from the city atmosphere that I'm so used to.
We switched trains and this time I sat by Kotarou and Kiyoto and we talked some more.
I really enjoy talking to the Japanese students, they really make conversation fun and although the language barrier is a pain in the ass most of the times, sometimes it's really interesting trying to get your point across.
After a what seemed like a short time (but what was actually a while) we arrived at Nikko!
We walked to the bus stop to wait for a bus that would take us up to a really big shrine.
The area around the bus stop was nice and scenic.
Ikki was freaken tired.
The rest of the Japanese students were doing fairly well, but I could kind of tell some of them were tired.
Bus came soon afterwards.
It kind of dropped us off in a random spot, and I don't know why we were just standing around.
Later I found out that we were waiting for a tour guide.
After about 10-15 min, the tour guide showed up and proceeded to take us to various sites.
The walk didn't take too long, but the shrine wasn't exactly nearby either.
On the way we passed by several thingies.
This is when I figured out why some of my pictures came out so shitty.
I've been shooting at high contrast for all of my previous pictures (pretty much).
So I started playing with some settings until I came up with 3 presets (one for indoors, one for outdoors, and one for in between). So you'll see some funky colors until it gets straightened out.
So we entered the main gate and walked up the pathway up to the shrine.
On the way we stopped by this. I don't know what it is because I couldn't hear the tour guide, but it looked pretty cool.
So after that, we were pretty much there.
Anyways, starting from here, I don't really know how to explain this stuff to you guys, so this will, again, be another gigantic picture dump with some comments here and there.
STARTING NOW.
At this point of tour, we had to climb fucking 200 HIGH ass steps to get to the top of a high shrine.
It was damn tiring.
These steps don't fuck around.
They're a good 2 inches higher than normal steps.
And there were over 200 of them.
Some steps higher up were like 5 inches higher.
The top was pretty interesting as well.
I thought this vending machine was pretty funny.
Our tour had pretty much concluded and we were all freaken hungry.
Off to find food.
They took us to this restaurant nearby that had a variety of noodle dishes and rice dishes.
Most of us got noodle dishes because Kanno-san told us that the rice ones would probably take a while, because when we got there, they just ran out of rice and would have to make more.
(Although some people still got rice dishes, which pissed off some people)
Our food took a long time to come out but it finally did.
I had the tempura udon.
I don't even eat shrimp.
But it was good.
I dunno if it was cuz I was freaken hungry, but it was delicous.
Afterwards, we had a little free time to look around the shops.
Some people bought candy and stuff for souvenirs.
We had so much free time that we pretty much sat around cuz we saw everything around the train station.
Everyone was freaken tired by the time we had to go back on the train home.
The train ride home was very entertaining.
One of the things that I did was try to get a shot of everyone who was sleeping.
I got most of them (I'll put the names by them, just in case you still don't know who's who).
JK, Ikki was faking.
Also, during the train ride, I was talking with the quadrant of Eric, Teresa, Lali, and Valerie (when they were still awake) and it was just entertaining just fucking around.
I was also messing around with Kotarou and Ikki, since they were sitting right behind me.
I tried taking a sneak picture of Kotarou by putting my camera slowly up pointing downwards behind me but of course he noticed a big, black camera and by the time I pulled it back down to look at my results, I found this:
And thus started the camera wars between me and Kotarou, which was silly and fun.
That was pretty much the day.
Lots of pictures with little text.
Tomorrow we have class again and also very possibly we have an outing for sushi with Mana and Ikumi (and maybe others).
No comments:
Post a Comment