#associated kyoto program

Go and come back

This morning my daughter took off on a plane headed to Japan for her Junior Year Abroad. She has been dreaming of this since she was the pseudonymous first Little/then Light Princess on my old blog. She started watching a Japanese cartoon with her brother and when the dubbed episodes ran out, she found the later seasons online with English subtitles. She came to love the language and began to…

When I looked for colleges, I looked for two things: A good EAS department, and a good study abroad trip to Japan. That's all I wanted, and that eventually lead me to go to Smith College, which is a part of the Associated Kyoto Program. 

So when I say I've been preparing for this my whole life, I pretty much mean it. I knew that I'd be leaving my home for a while to explore and learn the language of a country that has fascinated me for literal decades. I was prepared to leave my friends, and even my family for a year. What I didn't account for, was Capen. For those of you who don't know me in "real" life, I belong to a house called Capen at Smith college. (We're fancy at Smith and live in actual houses instead of dorms.) Capen is filled with fantastic, unique, talented people, and I honestly cannot say that there is a place that is filled with more support and love for me anywhere on this earth; it's a house filled with 70 of some of my dearest friends and family. Leaving them wasn't a part of what I'd been planning for, and that has made it the hardest part of my journey so far. I could write novels about the wonderful people who are, and have been in that house, but I'll save that for another day.

Tomorrow, I fly to Japan to embark on an 8-month, 2-semester trip to Japan where I hope I will learn more about myself, gain some confidence and skill in communicating through the Japanese language, hopefully make some friends, and maybe even figure out some of my future. I realize it will be tough at first, but I am really looking forward to a great year in a place I've dreamed of all my life.

- Aurian Eghbalian ('14)

Day 3!

Kirsten was very enthusiastic about the fact that they had corn at breakfast!

But after breakfast, we went back to our room and Kirsten wanted to go back to bed.  We piled all of our futon on top of her, took a picture, and then sat on her. ^_^

Once we finally packed up our stuff and got Kirsten out of bed, it was time to go exploring!

At Miyajima, there are tiny, adorable tame deer EVERYWHERE.

But I didn't realize just how friendly they were until we walked right up to one and it let us pet it.  So cute! And it tried to figure out if my camera was edible. ^^

Miyajima is such a pretty place.

I walked down by the water.  Different side of the world, but it's still the ocean!

In my hurry to snap photos while walking, this one ended up tilted, but I really like how it turned out.

So many deer!

It was cute to see little kids interacting with them.

See the deer in the foreground of this photo?

This is a very mischievous deer.  Although we had heard that deer would try to eat any scraps of paper that they could see, this one grabbed the edge of my shirt and would not let go!  I panicked, not wanting it to rip my shirt, and attempted to pry its jaws open with both hands.  We derped around in circles for a while in this way, with me yelling and trying to open its mouth, and it playfully refusing to let go.  Finally it gave up.  Thankfully my shirt was intact, although I soon noticed that I had managed to cut my thumb a little on the deer's teeth while trying to open its mouth.  I ran to the restroom nearby to wash it out and put a band-aid on it.  Before the field trip, we had got a memo from Lofgen Sensei that had mentioned something like "we might have to fight off the deer at Miyajima", but I had thought it was a joke!

It wasn't until that evening that I suddenly started to worry about the possibility of rabies.  "Holy crud, I don't want to die of rabies just because I cut my finger on a deer's tooth while on a school field trip!"  The internet assured me that Japan is a rabies-free country, but I double checked with the my host family, the AKP staff, and my Japanese sensei just to be sure.  They either told me that it was incredibly unlikely, or made fun of me (in Japanese class, our sensei used the grammar patterns we were learning to make up example sentences like "The only thing that would stop Murayama-san from going to the anime convention is if she died of rabies.")  Good to know that I'm not going to start foaming at the mouth.

But aside from that one deer, the rest of them were sweet and friendly.

The famous tori-i of Itsukushima-jinja!

We bought tickets and entered the shrine.

In addition to appreciating the history and beautiful scenery, Mabs and I couldn't help but think that this would be a really nice location for a Mouri photoshoot.

After walking through the shrine, we went to the Treasure Room, which was filled with all sorts of awesome artifacts and samurai armor.  (They even had armor from the Mouri and Takeda clans!)

Then we went up the hill to check out the pagoda.

Hideyoshi ordered this gigantic wooden building to be build, but it was never finished.

They gave us green slippers to wear inside.

The inside was filled with all sorts of paintings.

The ceiling was really cool.

And for reasons that I still don't understand, there were a ton of rice paddles, and of which were ridiculously huge, everywhere we went in Miyajima.  This place was no exception.

After that, we walked around and checked out all of the little shops, and bought momiji manju as omiyage for our host families. We wandered around a lot, and we kept passing this place called "Dr. Fish."  Mabs was like "C'mon, you only live once," so we paid our 500 yen and went inside.

You put your feet into a pool of water, and a bunch of tiny fish supposedly clean your feet! Ohmygosh it tickled so much, I thought I was going to die of laughter!

For some reason the fish liked Mabs' feet way more than mine! :P (I was okay with that; just the amount of fish that I had was definitely ticklish enough!)

We paid for 7 minutes, which actually felt like a really long time.  Oh gosh, when I put my socks and shoes on, I felt like the fish were still there and I was stepping on them as I walked.  The whole thing was such a strange feeling, but it was quite a fun adventure! LOL  Definitely the most laughter we've ever got out of 500 yen.

We then found a place where you could get fried momiji manju. Yum!  They even gave us free tea with it.

After a bit more wandering around, we met up with the rest of the AKP group, left Miyajima on the ferry, and got back on the bus for the 6 hour ride back to Kyoto Station.

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Such a fun field trip! ^_^

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Omiyage for myself!