Yes, it is July, so it’s time for Gion Matsuri again! Last time we celebrated Kyoto’s most famous festival wearing yukatas (summer kimonos), but this year we decided to go in our normal clothes Gion Matsuri is celebrated by a colourful parade of over 60 different floats. We went to the evening festival before the [...]
Yesterday was the opening party of the Exchange Student Exhibition at Kyoto Seika University! Our work can also be seen there. We printed some of the work we made so far during our stay here If you’re in the neighbourhood, come see, and if you’re not, see these photos
We encountered this monster last night in our kitchen!!! The only way to kill these dangerous creatures is to poor hot water over them… Now it’s like a boiled shrimp :-s
Today we went to a beautiful temple high up in the mountains! It was so secluded that no one was there, a really calming experience. Also there was a picture of the temple’s guardians, the monkeys that live there. Before that we had a delicious lunch in an old soba (Japanese noodles) restaurant. We even [...]
I bought a nice children’s book about Japanese bugs now I can look up the names of all the creepy, nasty and way too big insects we encounter here …
Finally made a picture of a firefly (hotaru). June is hotaru season and a lot of them magically float next to our house.
More cute candy! Not so delicious though, there’s some weird jelly stuff inside…
Our teacher gave away presents today: mini gameconsoles
We don’t update this blog very often, mostly because we post on Facebook as well SBut I will try to post those messages here too! We’ve been busy the last couple of weeks, mostly with our school projects, but also learning Japanese and working on our own art projects. Here is some art we made [...]
Time goes by so fast! We’ve been here for over a month now and have been quite busy with school. Ward is drawing a 40-page manga for his class about Dutch folklore, and it will be exhibited in the Manga Museum next year! The story is about “de Solse gat” and it’s going to be [...]
This week, the sakura (Japanese cherry blossom) started blooming! Since there are so many sakura trees, it is truly an awesome sight to behold. The trees, that are actually somewhat bland during the rest of the year, suddenly explode with pink/white flowers. The trees stay like this for about a week, and then the flowers [...]
Together with our friend Tokutaro, we had a trip to Lake Biwa, the biggest lake of Japan. Tokutaro has a car, so he showed us places we didn’t go before, and it was a lot of fun! One place in particular was fascinating, a mountain with a large temple build on to it. When we [...]
This is a very funny video, made by Kyoto Seika students. It shows the university’s library and surroundings, but most of all it’s a very entertaining video So watch and enjoy and taste the atmosphere of Seika University!
Gotta catch ‘m all! While walking through Gion, the old entertainment district of Kyoto, we stumbled upon two Maiko. Maiko are Geisha apprentices. At the height of the Geisha era, the 1930′s, men came from all around the country to compete with each other to be with the most popular geisha. From what we saw [...]
Yesterday we arrived in beautiful Kyoto, and as the taxi dropped us of at our new home it started to snow! We live in a lovely tradtional Japanese house with tatami mats, futons and no chairs . The surrounding are amazing, there is a very nice and quiet temple in our backyard (Honen-in) and Ginkaku-ji [...]