i'm back home with my skyscrapers and crowded subways! yay! and as i was coming out of the station, i met ben and jeff and anika so i had a nice dinner with them, also yay!

but, i returned to find that nice simple musashi-sakai station has been transformed into some ludicrous maze-like entity that involves many stairs. growl.

and, on top of that, next to icu's huge hideous glowing cross is now a huge hideous glowing christmas tree. it has disgusting colored lights and some star on the top and it's not even the right kind of tree! and to make it even worse, it's NOT SYMMETRICAL! the whole pathway up to icu is perfectly symmetrical, trees lining both sides and then a big circular path and the hideous cross right at the end. but now off to the left side is this enormous glowing tree, which not only looks awful but throws off the whole thing! aaggh! icu, you fail at having anything resembling taste.

and that is my thoroughly pointless rant for the evening.

for a change of pace, the final photos of my kyoto trip:
( pictures of tofukuji )

( oh wow! more photos! i bet you never would've seen that coming! )

...and now for some ( whining about japan )

today i went to fushimi-inari shrine with lorna! it couldn't have been better - awesome shrine, awesome weather, and awesome lorna. ^_^ lorna, i hope you come to tokyo sometime when i'm actually there!

it's always been my dream to go to fushimi-inari, i've seen it in movies and such, so it was so cool to actually get to go. and it lived up to all expectations! we had a nice stroll through the long lines of bright red torii, and then wandered off on a little path which took us through a gorgeous forest on the edge of the shrine. it was very peaceful-feeling.

( only a few pictures this time, really! )

lorna directed me to a street called teramachi-dori, which is a big shopping street that very much reminded me of kichijouji's sun road. oh, what will i do without shopping streets when i go back to america? ;_; but, the best thing was finding kyoto metamorphose, which i just had to go in... and i'm very glad i did! the girl working there was so nice, she just came up and started giving me her sales pitch in japanese, no "nihongo ga dekimasu ka?" or trying to talk to me in english or simply ignoring me like most salespeople do, she just talked to me as if i would understand, and we ended up having a pretty fun conversation. she pushed me to try on this ADORABLE coat, which was too small, and a jumper skirt and a skirt in the same pattern, which were also too small... the bad thing was, i was almost considering actually buying one if it did fit, which would have been very bad of me. but it was so cute! ohhh, i wish i was as small as a japanese person!

i'm in kyoto and i feel fine!!!! and tomorrow i see lorna! (oh wow, it's been way too long!)

( fifty billion pictures with ramblings about my vacation thus far )

well, i was feeling kinda down today... there's something a little lonely about spending thanksgiving entirely on your own. i think in the future when i'm not with other people on holidays i need to go out somewhere... i was so exhausted from nikko yesterday that i didn't leave my room at all today, and i think that was a mistake. but, there seems to be plans for a late thanksgiving dinner for tomorrow, so yay!

but anyway, i had an awesome time yesterday! we went to nikko, which is quite a far ways away from tokyo, and is famous for its beautiful scenery and temples and shrines and whatnot. we were cheap and didn't take the fancy-dancy bus tour, so we didn't see a lot of the famous waterfalls or onsen, but we saw a lot of absolutely gorgeous scenery and we had lots of fun, so i don't feel like i missed anything.

i was peer-pressured into posting most of these pics on facebook, but for those of you who don't have facebook/want an explanation, here they are: ( nikko! )

i must say, though, as much as i enjoy visiting places like that, i am definitely a city girl. waiting for the train home it was only 7 and EVERYTHING was closed, not a conbini or a starbucks in sight, forget neon lights or designer clothing stores... ack! why would one ever want to commune with nature when you could buy things instead?! ^_^;

i really need your help, people!

okay, so i'm trying to do this report on self-esteem in young people, and it occurred to me that it would be really really helpful if i had some sort of data of my own on it. but there's a bit of a problem with this: i'm presenting on tuesday so i really don't have time to draw up a real survey and put it in people's mailboxes or whatever. so, of course, i come to you all!

the comments are screened and of course you can post anonymously if you would feel more comfortable with that. also, please feel free to elaborate as much as you want on the answers! they can be answered with just a yes or a no, but more information is very welcome.

as you can tell by my very shallow, broad questions and the fact that i'm doing this mainly over lj, this isn't supposed to be some scientifically accurate survey or anything like that - it's just to get an idea of what some young people would say about their self-esteem.

please do this for me!

( survey )

so guess who spent the afternoon at the ghibli museum?!

( *sings* tonari no totoro, totoro... )

now i think i'm gonna take it easy for a few days and stop running around everywhere. -_-

i can't decide if i love it here or hate it here. half of me wants to leave right now and never set foot in this country again, and the other half of me thinks this is the best time i've had in my life. yay for being confused?

in other news, new layout! lj doesn't seem to be letting me choose any of my own colors for things, so for now i'm stuck with the color schemes they have, but this is very pretty so it's all good.

today was shoko's birthday, so we took her out to eat at a yummy italian restaurant... i'm so glad i have such friendly roommates. but they're trying to convince me and sou-sou to try out the ofuro (public bath, which we have in global house), and i'm very nervous about this... i am not comfortable being naked in front of other people, period. not even people i'm screwing. so i'm definitely not comfortable being naked in front of my roommates in a tiny ofuro. but this is an important experience and very much a part of traditional japanese life (and not traditional as well, because shoko and yoko use it all the time) and i know i need to try it. meh.

anyway, i went to senso-ji in asakusa the other day! it was my first time out in tokyo by myself, which was a little nerve-wracking but overall very fun. senso-ji is essentially a big tourist attraction but is supposed to be a temple to kannon. i went for my philosophy and religion in japan midterm paper... we were told to go to some religious site and spend several hours there observing and/or participating in what goes on, and write a paper about what we observe. i thought this was a pretty awesome requirement for a midterm, because it's both very fun and very educational. so, i spent about 3 hours there (not very long, really) and took about 100 pictures and wrote 4 pages of notes, and i'm not sure i actually "learned" a lot, but i certainly became very curious about a lot of what i saw. i'm actually excited about doing more research to find out exactly what it was i saw!

( senso-ji )

today julie (really sweet girl from the philippines who's in 2 of my classes and lives on the same floor as me, yay!) and i went to akihabara! for, like, 8 hours. wow.

( akihabara! )

very very good news: there is a coldstone in roppongi!!! my last sadness about japan has gone! not only have i found gay-friendly people, feminists, and RENT fans here, i have now found a coldstone!!! this is very good because i have been craving coldstone soooo badly. but me and my roommates are gonna go soon, so yay!

today me and my roommates had a takoyaki-making party! it was so much fun!

first haruna and sou-sou and i went out to buy the ingredients at a big expensive department store (the bottom floors of department stores here have food). then we prepared everything and sat around for a very long time waiting for shoko... but while we were waiting we had a wonderful conversation about differences between japan and korea and america, all sorts of things from holidays to clothing to literature to how much people use drugs to standardized testing to writing in kanji... it was awesome. i feel like i know a lot more now, and am closer to them both.

and then shoko finally turned up and we ate lots and lots of takoyaki. which i will now describe step-by-step in great detail with many yummy-looking pictures, just in case any of you are desperately interested in how takoyaki is made. ^_^;

( takoyaki party! )

so, i just spent the day in harajuku with kate and alexis and chris and vince (well, until vince left us to go to an utada hikaru concert. *jealousyjealousy*)... but anyway, i love how i can easily go to harajuku or shinjuku or shibuya for the afternoon. it's not even a whole day trip, it just takes about an hour each way... teehee.

we just walked up and down takeshita-dori (the big teen fashion street, for you non-japanophiles who do not know this) and looked at all the shops and people. and ate crepes. mmmm. there were several (very cute) lolitas, but it seems that the weirdly-thrown-together-mismatched look was the most popular... not too different from london, really. why are american kids so boring with their clothes??

and, miss koala! while most of the gothic lolita shops on takeshita-dori are kinda cheap and crappy, there was one that had GORGEOUS clothes for relatively cheap (like, 9,000yen for a full outfit). i wish you could have been there!

there were many clothes i wanted to buy, but i didn't buy much because there's a lot of things that cute little japanese girls can pull off that gaijin just can't. i did get a cool looking shirt with
sunflowers on it, though! and more stationery, because i just can't resist it... it had smiling houses on it! who can resist smiling houses?

i seem to get along quite well with alexis and kate, although i don't talk much. but i never talk much. i do seem to be quite useful here, which i NEVER was at home... i always know the directions and what train to take and whatnot. that is, like, the opposite of the anya i used to be. but this is good.

i also managed to ride my bike to and from the station, which i'm proud about because i just started learning and the streets are very narrow and busy. i managed to not run into any pedestrians! but i crashed into hedges 4 times, and had to stop and start again about a million times, and was swerving all over the place. (one japanese guy on the way back asked kate if i was drunk. hmph.)

anyway this is a very long entry and i made 2 entries already today so i will stop now. pictures to come in a couple seconds.

EDIT: ( pictures! )

today we went to some places that were a little less tourist-y than usual, places that were a little more out of the way. it's amazing how much quieter and less busy london can be when you're not right in the middle of everything.

( tate gallery, etc. )

i went to platform 9 3/4!!

look, look! (it is much too cool for an lj-cut.)



yeah, it was awesome, we went to king's cross station and went on what we thought was a highly ridiculous search for platforms 9 and 10. when we got there, between the two platforms they had this sign for platform 9 3/4, with this trolley pushed most of the way through the wall. it was sooo adorable.

more updates to follow later, i just had to show you all that right away. ^_^

we went on a day trip today to hampton court with helena and naomi and auntie nicola and uncle chris. hampton court was where king henry VIII lived (or one of the places, anyway...), but it had a lot of history before that and after that, and the whole thing is a spectacular mixture of different architectural styles from different time periods (i, of course, am not nearly sophisticated enough to understand such things, but everyone else kept talking about it so this is what i gathered from them.)

as awesome as france was, i think i much prefer england. the english tend to be more understated in their palaces and gardens, less disgustingly ornate and more simply elegant. i mean, english palaces/gardens are all very very grand, but not quite so overdone. what can i say, the english just naturally have better taste! ^_~

also, they have a hedge maze! it was soo cool! i've never been in one of those before. i don't know if this is common or if i'm the only 20-year-old alive who hasn't been in one, helena and naomi had been in several, but i've only seen them in movies. but we went in and actually managed to find our way to the middle in a relatively short period of time. there were lots of us, though, so at least one person always remembered if we'd been in a certain place before. if you were in there all by yourself, you really could go absolutely insane never knowing if you'd been down a certain path before, going in circles, everything looking the same... it was awesome. ^_^;

unfortunately, my skills at social interaction are not improving one bit. i've adopted a generally successful "be seen and not heard" strategy, don't say anything unless directly asked, but the second someone does actually ask me something, i get so terrified i can barely think of the answer. oh, well.

and now here's a whoole ton of pictures of hampton court and the v&a and london in general...

( way more pictures than you want to see! )

my new icon comes from a picture i took of the sunflowers in one of the gardens.. ^_^ i *heart* sunflowers. i dunno if i *heart* that icon, because making icons in paint seriously sucks, but when i get photoshop maybe i can make a better one.

okay, so, sorry for the previous angry rant, i just get really really frustrated sometimes.

today we went to the victoria and albert museum, and i was seriously impressed. i think that's my favorite museum of all time. ^_^; if any of y'all go to london, don't miss it. it has free admission and the whole atmosphere is just really friendly. they have this lovely little fountain in the courtyard, and all these little kids were playing in it like a swimming pool, and this was apparently perfectly acceptable. they let you take pictures throughout the whole museum, and they had a couple exhibitions telling you to "please touch"... it just had a really friendly feel to it. it also had the widest variety of stuff - throughout my life, i've seen so many impressionist paintings and renaissance artwork and all those goddamned madonna and childs, i know it sounds terrible but i do not feel any need to see any more of those for quite awhile. but this museum had so much more than all that, it had stained glass windows and wrought iron gates and samurai armor and a ton of silver(including stuff by my great uncle, that was pretty cool) and glasswork and beatles albums and furniture and a huge fashion collection (which of course delighted me, especially the vivienne westwood bondage suit... mwah. vivienne westwood is my hero.), and so many other things no one could mention it all. they were having a big exhibition on che guevara, but i didn't go.

as if it wasn't cool enough already, they had excellent explanations of all the stuff. we were particularly impressed with the photography collection... they explained in a very easy-to-understand way the ideas the photographers were trying to convey by the photos, which let me appreciate the work a lot more than i would have. i really wish there were more museums like this. the variety was amazing, i swear even the most add person could spend hours in there, and it did so much to really catch your interest, without this foreboding "we are too elite for you" kinda feel that a lot of museums have, but it was still a very serious museum (not like exploris or something). i highly highly recommend it.

then we went to look at the cutesy antique shops on portobello road, but we apparently spent too much time in the v&a because they were closed. but we wandered around notting hill and saw all the fancy houses (and sorry, james, we did not see either julia roberts or hugh grant. i will look harder next time. ^_^;; )

pictures may or may not follow depending on how lazy i am.

we were all too exhausted to do much of anything today, we took a tour on a riverboat which was nice, and then we attempted to walk down the rue du faubourg saint-honore, which is where all the haute couture shops are... mwah. i saw prada and dolce & gabanna (oh, i want some dolce & gabanna sunglasses soooo much...) and yves saint laurent and chanel (*hearts*, maybe even more than i *heart* d&g) and hermes and gucci (although i really don't like gucci, so i avoided it)... yeah, it was awesome. except it was way too hot and i couldn't really appreciate it because i felt dizzy and sick. so that was that.

i do have to say, though, there is something seriously wrong with displaying fall fashions, complete with heavy coats and warm tights, in heat like that. you don't even want to LOOK at it, much less buy it.

anyway, the most priceless sight of the day: 3 Muslim women, dressed head to toe in black with only their faces showing, walking out of the prada store with a huge christian dior bag. it was about the last thing we would've expected, it was lovely.

so, i was a cheesy tourist and went to the eiffel tower, much to my grandma's dismay. it was actually surprisingly beautiful, in its own strange way... it was also much bigger than i expected. i didn't go up it, because it was much too hot and the lines were very long, but i'm very glad i saw it in real life.

the opera house was just amazing, in that sick decadent grossly-overdone kind of way. it was hard to decide whether it was beautiful or hideous. i've never seen a building quite that opulent before... i thought the covent garden opera house was fancy, but it didn't hold a candle to this.

the whole place had this creepy element to it along with (or maybe because of) the decadence. you could really see how the phantom of the opera novel was inspired by that opera house. there was a constant theme of masks throughout the whole house, horribly creepy masks engraved on the walls, laughing and sometimes looking like they were screaming. there were also mirrors everywhere... the whole atmosphere just made you feel that something really eery was being concealed. i think it made me understand the phantom of the opera a lot more, and being a huge phantom fan, this was a happy thing.

then we went to the nearby galeries lafayette, which is apparently a famous french department store. i tried on some lovely chanel sunglasses, only 330 euro... ^_^;; but we didn't get too far because we were waaay exhausted by this point. we've been walking all around paris for the past 3 days, with hardly any sleep (the room is too small, so we can't sleep), in the exhausting heat... it's no wonder we've collapsed. but we had a lovely traditional french dinner (i had salad with goat's cheese and walnuts, mmmmm) and now we're home. yay!

( beware of decadence! )

i had an awesome day today!

today we went on a lovely walk in the 100 degree heat (ugh) to the louvre... yay! one thing i didn't realize about the louvre was how the palace that the artwork is housed in is really just as spectacular as the artwork itself... it was originally a palace for the royalty in the time of louis xiv and xv, and it is very very grand. as mommy said, it makes buckingham palace look like a suburban semi-detached. ^_^; there are sculptures all over it and the most gorgeous rooftops and it really just looks the way that one would think a palace ought to look.

inside the louvre there is a tooon of stuff. you think museums in america are big, but this was simply enormous. there were also a ton of people, more than mommy or grandma had seen before, which we're guessing probably has something to do with the da vinci code. we ended up not seeing the mona lisa because a) none of us are terribly fond of it, b) mommy felt really uncomfortable being in a place with so many people and no obvious way to get out, and c) we wouldn't have been able to see it anyway, because in front of any of the major paintings were crowds of japanese people on sightseeing tours and you couldn't see anything.

we saw some gorgeous egyptian artwork and greek statues. there was one egyptian painting of a young girl that i found really striking, i don't know why, she looked so young and beautiful but so jaded somehow, like the last thing in the world she wanted was to have her picture painted. and there was something so sad about this young face stuck in a museum staring out over a dark exhibit... i dunno, but i spent forever looking at it. anyway, then we went to the medieval louvre, which is the excavations they've done of the palace that was there in medieval times. that was absolutely amazing. like, i don't think i've ever been so taken with a museum exhibit before... it was just stones of the original moat, but there was something so magical about those stones, you could feel their age and their strength so strongly. they felt alive somehow, filled with power even though many of the stones were crumbling. i wish i could, like, live there or something. ^_^;;

then we went out of the louvre and back into the murderous heat and made our way to the nearby fashion museum, where they had a balenciaga exhibit. i'd never known much about balenciaga (i didn't even know there still was a house of balenciaga, i thought it was an older thing, oops) but now i am totally taken. he obviously had an amazing grip on what was happening in the world, his fashions do exactly what i was talking about in my bananaspicier post - they reflect our society back to us. they show the world as it is, but through beauty. the last part of the exhibit was the stuff from this year, and they had all the mannequins wearing creepy glowing binocular-like things with tubes coming out of their heads, like something from the matrix, and then they were wearing these spectacular, sexy, and thoroughly useless-looking clothes.... omg, i am in love. i could go on for several more pages about balenciaga, but i don't think any of you are nearly as interested in this sorta stuff as i am, so i won't.

on the sweltering walk back, the best thing ever happened... i've gone absolutely crazy about these "smart cars", they have lots in england and lootttttsss in paris, and i'm determined to get a good picture of one. they are the cutest things ever, and apparently really safe, and get about 75 miles/gallon, and i love them. so this guy is driving past in his smart car, and he stops in the traffic, and i get out my camera, and he sees that i'm trying to take a picture and he indicates with his arms, "sure, take a picture!" and he looks very pleased with this... and i must add, this guy is GORGEOUS, we were thinking maybe he's some movie star or model or something, i dunno, but he was one of the best looking guys i've ever seen. and then the traffic starts moving again, and he WAITS for me to finish taking my picture before he waves and drives off, holding up all the traffic... omg, it was the coolest thing ever.

anyway, before i murder your friends pages, here are ( pictures!! )

updating all the way from paris, hooray!

it's lovely here, really. all stereotypes about the romance and elegance of paris are completely true (at least as far as i can tell after one day here...) it just has this certain charm about it, you can't quite put it into words but there's something in the air here. and they have eclairs. mmmm.

we arrived here in the early afternoon after a somewhat exhausting trip on the eurostar. i can't believe i was in the chunnel! aaah! there might have been sharks swimming above me!

anyway... yeah. we came to our lovely hotel on the rue dauphine and then set off to notre dame cathedral, which was absolutely amazing. mommy says she thinks it's the most beautiful cathedral in europe, and although i haven't seen nearly as many cathedrals in europe as she has, i'm sure i'd agree. i like visiting cathedrals, but usually i'm rather so-so about them. notre dame was definitely not something to be so-so about. it was amazing. i know nothing about architecture, but there was something just perfect about the way it was built, especially the inside of it. i loved all the different beautiful stained-glass windows and the way the arches met on the ceiling and how it all flowed together so whatever angle you were looking from, it looked perfect. it didn't have a very religious feel to me, more a show of "look how cool our building is!", but i didn't mind that. (i did, however, have a strong urge to buy one of the rosaries that was on sale at the gift shop for jamesy... teehee... but i decided that it wasn't worth buying something just to piss someone off.)

then mommy and i left grandma to sleep while we went to the jardin du luxembourg (lovely gardens/park around the palais du luxembourg, which is apparently where the senate now meets). they were very pretty, beautiful flowers growing and whatnot, not much really to describe... i think that paris is really an atmosphere more than anything else, nothing you can put into words or even pictures, something you really have to experience. i'm glad i'm gonna have the opportunity to experience it at least a little bit.

( and here are the pictures of our first day! (quite a lot of them) )

i'm going to paris tomorrow!!!

apparently it's having a terrible heat wave, over 100 some days, and especially for grandma that's just not okay, so i really really hope we're still able to do some things... i've always wanted to go to paris!

observation about england: it seems much, much more vegetarian-friendly here than it is in america. pretty much all food you buy in the grocery stores, even things like peanut butter and bread, has a big V on it if it's vegetarian. menus at restaurants have this same big V by vegetarian dishes, and all the places i've eaten at so far have plenty of vegetarian choices on their menus. it would not be at all difficult to be vegetarian here. even for non-vegetarians, more ethical food seems much more common here than in america... the grocery stores (i've been in three so far, i think grandma likes the variety) are absolutely packed with organic food, and whenever you get food that has eggs in it, the eggs are always very clearly marked as free range, like this "Free Range Egg and Watercress Sandwich" that is very common here... i think this is excellent, obviously eating more ethically has become quite mainstream here, instead of like america where only the crazy radical types care about such things.