Oosaka-Kyoto Trip

This past Sunday, all the Seattle U kids at Sophia went to Oosaka and Kyoto. We just got back this morning. On Sunday, we took the Shinkansen to Oosaka. That thing was really fast!!! It popped all of our ears it went so fast.

We arrived in Oosaka just 2 and a half hours later. We took the subway to our hotel, and when we left the station, we wondered what we got ourselves into. The air was thick and smelled like cigarette smoke everywhere. We even saw a guy riding a bike with a lit cigarette in his mouth! The hotel we stayed at was a Best Western. We wanted to keep it cheap, so we only got three 2-person rooms for the 8 of us and decided to sneak 2 people in. It was a lot harder than we thought it was going to be because the hotel was on the 9th floor of this mall-complex thing called "Oscer Dream" (sic).

After the hotel situation was figured out, we went to Oosaka Castle park. It was really lively! There were people everywhere picnicking and having a good time. The park was huge and beautiful with lots of cherry blossoms. We got lost on the way to the castle, so we asked a local, and it was really strange... He spoke half in Japanese and half in English and seems just a little bit drunk. After showing us the way and telling us "Together, ok", he proceeded to high-five us all. From that point on, we saw how nice Oosaka people were! The castle was huge and was basically a museum. I'll upload the pictures and videos I took there. Later that night, we went to this one famous Oosaka street (I forgot the name >_<;;). We had takoyaki (octopus balls) and sang Karaoke. It was really cool.


The next day, we headed for Kyoto, which is just an hour away by train. I was really looking forward to it, because Kyoto is the only city that wasn't completely burned down during WWII. But, just our luck, it rained ALL DAY. And not just drizzle rain, full blown rain that wouldn't let up. We went to a few temples, but had to call it quits early. When we got back to Oosaka, we explored our hotel further. It was really fun!

The day after that, we decided to give Kyoto another shot. I'm really glad we did, because it was beautiful out! We went to the Golden Temple, which was a little underwhelming for the 400 yen entrance fee, the Nijoji (sp?) castle which was this old shogunate castle that was really beautiful and cool, and finally, my favorite place we went to so far, the torii gates. At Shinto shrines, a torii is the arch thing you walk through when you enter it. This place had hundreds of them, all lined up! It's really tough to describe (even tougher when I feel like I'm about to pass out :-P), but it was this little village/set of shrines built into the mountainside. It was AMAZING and extremely beautiful. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page about the shrine. We headed back to Oosaka where we caught the overnight bus back to Tokyo.

Today was club recruiting at our school. I joined 3 clubs (I think? 2 seemed a little flaky @_@), one of which was the Catholic Student Association. Surprisingly, I was the only foreigner who joined. Everyone else there was Japanese! They welcomed me kindly and we hung out for a while. They seem really nice and I can't wait to do more stuff with them.

Well, it's been a REALLY long weekend and day, so I'm signing off!!!