Birthday Party, Bowling, and Tour Guide Days

This post is a bit scattered due to my general lack of weekly activities due to school, and I didn't want to make separate post pages for each of these events just to have a few sentences about each, so I figured I would group them into one post!

Wednesday June 26th was Yifan's birthday. She had mentioned that it was coming up a few weeks back, so I kept asking her what she wanted to do. The day of, she decided that she wanted to go to the arcade with Oo-san and I. We spent around two hours at the arcade, playing some rhythm, racing, and dancing games. Oo-san had been playing some of the rhythm games for multiple years now, and was quite good at them. We also tried some of the claw machine games, where you can put in 100 yen coins and chance your luck to try and win a prize, usually plushies, anime figures, or other collectibles. We had no such luck, and probably spent around 1000 yen combined. They always make it seem like you are so close to winning to encourage you to keep spending, so we mutually agreed that we would each only spend a certain amount before forcing ourselves to leave. Afterwards, we found a shop selling bubble tea, sat down and drank them together while talking for a while. I definitely miss those two.

The following week, Momo and Alliyah (friends from the University of Denver) said they would be travelling from Tokyo to spend some time in Kyoto, and if I was at all free to hang out and show them around. I had time on Monday the 1st of July, so I met up with them at their hotels near Kyoto station. Alliyah and I had been trying to figure out what to do, and we decided on Ginkakujin (the golden palace) since I hadn't been there before, and going to Fushimi-Inari, because even though I had been there, I felt as though it was one of the fundamental Kyoto experiences.

Ginkakujin was cool but a little underwhelming - the palace was a great sight to see, but other than the short five minute walk around the lake that the palace stood within, there wasn't anything else to do at the location. Also, it cost 500 yen to enter and was decently rainy the entire time, so the experience wasn't anything crazy. I'm glad to have seen it in person and got away with a fun picture, but I definitely wouldn't put it on my "must-do" list for people visiting Kyoto.

Fushimi Inari was great and Momo and Alliyah grabbed a lot of fun pictures while walking in between the Tori gates. Unlike the previous time I had been there, we opted to not to the full hike since we weren't prepared and the steps were quite slippery. We found some fun artwork on some of the wish charms that people had hung up, two of the faces I took photos of were from the anime Attack on Titan, the third Vinland Saga. We did a small loop and then returned to Kyoto station, splitting up for a few hours to rest before meeting back up for dinner later in Shijo.

On the 6th of July, I showed up to the arcade in Kuramaguchi once again, but this time for a bowling tournament / social event with my music club! Kai was there again thankfully, because although my Japanese skills have gotten proficient enough to hold conversation, I can definitely be a little shy to start conversation with people I don't know, even in a friendly club setting. It doesn't help that the event was mostly underclassmen, who are pretty shy to begin with. The bowling was a blast however, and even though I lacked the vocab to talk about the sport, we all had fun watching and cheering each other on as we all tried our best. I realized I hadn't bowled in about a year at that point, and did surprisingly well. Since we played multiple games, I decided to start working on my spin technique, which turns out is a lot more complicated than I thought, but it looks really cool when you pull it off.

This bowling place had some pretty cool features, including one where it would record you from multiple angles on every throw, so that you could go to the touch screen and then play back your strikes. Also, every once in a while, the whole alley would pause for this "midnight strike contest" where everyone would wait for a countdown before continuing their game, so that everyone would send their balls down the lanes at the same time, which was quite entertaining to watch. I got stuck trying to think of a conclusion for this post, but couldn't really come to anything. I'm looking forward to my last weeks of school, even if that means it'll almost be time for me to return home from Japan.