Saturday, December 25th
On Christmas morning I opened a gift from my parents, some gifts from Lauren, and the gift from Jonathan. I knew he had made me a bowl because he had accidentally given the secret away while making it. But I had no idea what it looked like. It was beautiful!
Those pictures aren't the best. I haven't found a good way to take pictures of things in my apartment with the bad fluorescent lighting.
Underneath the bowl was a wooden box. It's really nice and cute! :)
The J is purple. It looks a little blue in that picture, at least on my computer.
That day we planned to see a few places in Kyoto. First we went to Kinkakuji. We took a bus from Kyoto Station. The bus was extremely crowded and we had to stand for a long time. It was difficult to stay balanced. Also, there was some crazy woman who was really really loud and obnoxious.I was very glad when we got off the bus!
I bought some apple mango juice... mmmmmm. :)
It looked pretty much the same as it had in the summer. This next picture is from the summer.
I guess it makes sense since it's mostly evergreen trees, but I was still surprised by how similar it looked.
I threw several coins. One of them hit the edge of the bowl and bounced off. Another one went into the bowl and bounced out. :( It's tricky!
Next we went to Ryoanji. Jonathan had been there before, but it was my first time.
It's very nice and peaceful. :)
Towards the end it started getting pretty chilly and it wasn't too long until sunset anyway, so we headed back. We had to take two different buses. However, when we got off the first bus to switch, we couldn't really figure out where the next bus would arrive. We were in a very lively area and were outside of an arcade. We went in to check out the arcade and ended up staying quite a while.
The arcade was awesome! It wasn't as crowded as the ones in Tokyo and it had tons of stuff. It even had DDR! I had been in a couple arcades in Tokyo, but none of them had had DDR. However, I didn't get a chance to play DDR because this one guy was playing it forever. He had a gym bag and towels... he was serious and prepared! He was good too!
The top floor had darts so we played a few games. I had never really played darts. It was a lot of fun! :) I'm very bad at it though.
Overall, it was a fun day. We didn't fit in as much as we hoped though. It's a bit difficult in the winter because the sun sets so early and once the sun goes down it gets pretty cold. But oh well. It was a good Christmas even though it didn't feel like Christmas at all.
