The Furusawa's house and the surrounding area

This is the Furusawa home (on the left) and van. Also, that is my blue bike. The Furusawa home is next to this post office.

This is a scarecrow in a rice paddy.

Here is a irrigation ditch that run along the rice paddy

Here are some shacks around the paddies

This is the sky.

This is from the park which is about one block away.

Here is a panoramic view of a rice paddy.

And, here is another panoramic view of a rice paddy.

Host Family and My Birthday

From the left is me, my Okaasan, my Otousan, in the back is Mamoru (the son-in-law) and finally, Toshi (a friend of the family).

This picture was taken at the high school culture festival. The girl on the left is Sophia, a family friend who teaches English at the high school as part of the JET program. I like Otousan's expression as we pretend to eat Toshi's cotton candy..

This is one of the performances at the culture festival. I actually recognized one of the songs they played. It was from Initial D. It might have been "Night of Fire." I can't remember.
Here is my Okaasan, me, and Kiyoe (my host sister) as we volunteer at a river clean up. On a side note, I found a plastic shopping bag full of empty cat food cans and two different boots.

Here is a shot of me on my 21st birthday. My Okaasan's birthday is on the seventh so we celebrated together.

Orientation Ceremony and Kyoto Tour

This is the president of Kansai Gaidai speaking at the orientation ceremony. This was followed by a poorly organized luncheon where they had one buffet and two converging lines.

This is ryan, he is 6 foot 5 inches. As we waited in line to buy a train ticket, he impressed everyone by picking up small children.

I wanted to see if he could pick me up. There is no picture, but I picked him up afterward and almost soiled myself in the process.

These are the girls who showed us around Kyoto. The names I can remember are Yumi and Madatsu and those might not even be right. Their English was pretty good and they were patient as my group and I took a lot of pictures. This picture was taken as we waited to switch trains.

This is the entrance to the temple we went to; I believe it is the Yasaka shrine.

When you enter a temple you must first wash your left hand, then your right, and then your left again (I think). Then, I was instructed to drink a little of the water and spit it out.

Here is a Shinto shrine inside the temple.

Here is me imitating a deity. I hope it was ok.

Here's a cool bird I saw.

These are paper lanterns; they light it up at night.

Observe:
Everybody's favorite, the rickshaw. The rickshaw drivers wear funny shoes which separate their big toes.

"jinrikishya"

This is what I ate at the temple. The ice cream flavor was chestnut (they were out of the green tea flavor, although I tried it and it was great); the brown things are mini fish. I later threw away the mini fish as they were very salty and very bad.

Here is another shrine. There is a "jizou" or stone statue inside. I stuck my camera in there, but could not find anything.

This is a random poster for sale at the temple. There were lots of things on sale there.

Like this:

These are traditional "Maiko," or dancing girls.

Kiyomizu is the name of this Buddhist temple with stone lanterns "tourou" outside of it.This is the hand cleansing area inside the Buddhist temple.

This is a "Kane" or place for keeping time. There is a gong inside and at the end of the year, they ring it 108 times to represent the different areas of the body. I believe its shape is the inspiration for the Japanese symbol for time.

This area was for cleansing inside the body. The water was from the mountain and I was told that each stream represents something different i.e., love, study, and money. I am not sure if those were the three...but I was told I drank from love.

"Daeki" means drool. Originally, I thought it was a mistranslation, but now, I guess it is a parody of some sort.

The devil car of Kyoto.

Here is a Buddhist "jizou" or stone statue.

Here is Kyoto at sunset. The colors were more brilliant than what showed up. I am still getting the hang of the camera.

Here is a rickshaw driver who let me wear one of the other rickshaw driver's hats.

This sign is at the train station and warns against taking picture up schoolgirls' skirts. Apparently, that sort of thing is frowned uponin Japan.

Bar and Pachinko

Here is some random bar I stopped at. I was given peas and a spoon along with my beer, and I am pretty sure that they over-charged me.

This is a pachinko parlor. It is a huge rip-off.

You put in about 8 dollars into the machine and then you are given so many metal balls. You then control how quickly these metal balls are fed into the machine.

After being fed into the the machine, the balls bounce around on pins and are usually lost. If, however, you are lucky and the balls bounce into a very small slot in the center, the machine then acts like a slot machine, and if you win, you are given more balls.

(I should not have used the flash right here)

I couldn't stop playing soon enough. The circular knob on the lower right-hand side controlled the flow, and a series of pink buttons controls the slot-machine game and the cash-out function. No one spoke English so this I learned through the pantomimes of the frustrated pachinko attendants as I kept repeating "I do not understand." I cashed out as soon as possible. That process was pretty strange, first the balls were counted and I was given a receipt. Then, I took that receipt to the back where an old man gave me two pieces of candy and a couple small plastic slides with yen inside. I was then led outside to an adjacent building where a chubby woman's hand behind a small window gave me 400 yen for those slides. (I gather that this is all an elaborate scheme to circumvent the laws against gambling in Japan.) All in all, I ended up losing 600 of the 1000 yen I paid into the machine. So, basically I paid about 5 bucks for two small pieces of candy and a lesson in avoiding pachinko parlors.