koyo san

Well this weekend we went on our first field trip to mt. koyo, the spiritual center of a major japanese buddhist sect. It was created 1200 years ago by The buddhist leader kukai. Being 1200 years old is really crazy, I really cant fully comprhend how many people have been there over that time. There was this grave yard, not really a grave yard in the usual sense because there werent any corpses buried there only the tomb stone, but there were over 300,000 tombs. There were small one of course but most were pretty big and there were a lot of enormous ones. And only in modern times was there something like a cable cart to get to the top of the mountain, people carried these giant stone monuments up the mountain.

We stayed in a very traditional Japanese house with tatami and futon. The weather ontop of the mountain was cold but it almost felt like inside was colder. I don't know how people survived in olden times if this was traditional. The next morning we had to sit through two meditation sessions, my legs hurt so much. For dinner and breakfeast we had vegetarian meals, which there are good japanese dishes like yakisoba that dont use meat but what we had was really weird and crazy stuff. For lunch we got to eat out and everyone was dying from some meat.

On tuesday I started my audited regular konan class. It was pretty interesting, its a large lecture class so I don't have to worry about being called on for questions but I think I only understood maybe a 1/4 of what the teacher was saying. They then passed out this questionare (on GIANT pieces of paper I dont get japanese printers) and it was interesting because there is the normal kanji for blue, but there are also older ones that arent used very often and it asked you like when you see blue kanji 1 do you think of blue skies or blue water or blue paint and when you see blue kanji 2 do you think of this etc... I of course only saw the first one so I couldn't really do much of it. The teacher also came up to me and said hi and asked my name, he also gave me the text book. I was really surprised at that. There isn't any furigana (small text in the alaphabet like script that is put above the kanji so you can pronounce it without knowing it) so its going to be very difficult if not impossible to read but I'll give in my best shot. I've been thinking I need to get one of the electronic japanese dictionaries, I have this DS software that is a dictionary but its pretty limited I'm often finding that the word I'm looking for isn't in there and it doesn't always give actual definitions. The stand alone electronic dictionaries (denshi jisho) are expensive, like $300 so I need to be a little cautious. I get $800 a month and want to stay around $400 in spending so I can come back home with some savings to pay off loans

well thats it for now