A nice day

 Today was nice!! I realized I was getting burnt on being with a big group so I decided to take a day mostly to myself. I finally made a trip to the grocery store which is right down the street. Good thing too because they don't give you any bags and I only brought my tote bag and it was filled. Unfortunately I couldn't find rice which is obviously somewhere just not where I was looking so I'll have to go back, but it was time for me to leave for Pilates!

I found this Pilates studio called Happynes't which is run by this really nice Belgian lady named Vanessa. It's also right next to a train station between my student residence and the university so I can use my commuter pass to get there which means the trip is on Stanford's dime :p Met some nice people there today, and then I came home and had a bento from the grocery store for lunch. Pretty good. 

From there I decided to go to Uji which is a district or town or I'm not really sure - some place that's famous for matcha and close enough to Kyoto or maybe in Kyoto. I got on the train and brought my book with me for the 40-minute journey, but I missed the stop to change trains because I was in the book so I changed plans (kindergarteners are flexible, iykyk) and headed for the Kyoto National Museum. It was HOT, so I thought this was a genius plan. Because museums have air conditioning. And when I got there I found out that with my Doshisha University ID card I can get in for free! Yay! But I also found out the museum was closed. Boo. So I walked through the museum garden for a minute and looked at maps and decided to go to Kawai Kanjiro's house, not knowing who Kawai Kanjiro is or was or why anyone would go to his house, only that it was marked as a museum. It turns out Kawai Kanjiro was a ceramic and wood artist, and his house is kind of just a traditional Japanese house (pretty cool; not air conditioned) with some wood and ceramic things inside. 

After that I went into this random cafe across the street. There were no customers inside, just this old'ish lady, tables and tatami mats, and the smell of incense. I felt so calm sitting in there, drinking my matcha and eating little あん小もち. I can't put it in English because I don't really know what it was but basically a mild-tasting mochi with red bean on top. As pictured. 

I was going to head to a big nearby temple at that point, but as I was walking I realized it was actually naptime so I headed back to the residence to rest. After a good nap and some reading, I left for the French Institute of Kansai with Kelechi and Kaidi (other Stanford students) on a journey that took us longer than it should have because we got on the bus going the wrong way, but was enjoyable with the company. We made it to this crazy art event called Nuit Blanche which apparently happens in a lot of cities across Europe (and apparently now in Japan). I heard about it from the Pilates people. We saw a big blowup holographic balloon ball that you could go inside, a poster installation about feminist liberation in Iran, and most memorably a long performance art/dance piece that mesmerized us all. It reminded me of being at the Fringe, just like, who are these people and how did they come out of nowhere with this incredible art. I didn't really have a sense for what it meant - a man violently shaking dust off his body, a gray-haired woman giving birth to a tree branch, someone turning from a forest monster into a human. But it was awesome. We also met up with Liliko who is one of the Japanese students taking one of our classes and she is so nice!! Yay for friends.

Afterward we ate ramen and they talked about anime and I tried to get us to talk about other things not anime. We started talking more and more in Japanese as the night continued. Yay for us! We got ice cream from a conbini and headed back on the train, learning Japanese tongue-twisters and trying to make up our own ("from gojo station at 5am (gozen goji) to jujo station at 10pm (gogo juji)"). We ran home from the station for no reason except fun and now it is RAINING hard. A good day.

_

As a little bonus episode here are some pictures from Fushimi-Inari which is a famous shrine nearby the residence that some of us went to at 5:30am the other day. Sweaty because it's kind of a hike but stairs. With Diego and Laywood.

Today was a reminder to meet myself with my own needs first, and that I don't need to do anything crazy to have a good day and an "exchange experience"! Finding the joy in simple things like grocery shopping and walking around + being open to where the wind takes me (a moment for the "yes, and" philosophy) + having my ears open to my needs and desires and prioritizing those (even if it means changing a plan / "missing out" for now) are some of my foundational ingredients.

Not sure how to end this so like, comment, subscribe xoxo