day 17 - kiyomizu! yahoo!

20/06/07 21:10
today i returned to my favourite place in all of japan and it was awesome! but back to the beginning. today was my day with masayuki, the son of the family. he is a university student (i don`t know of what exactly) so he had to leave the house early. i went to his university around lunchtime. he had his break and came out to meet me and we went to some restaurant, but i had just eaten breakfast so i didn`t order much. after that we went into the university, where he had one more lesson. to my dismay we went pretty much up to the front row. i had thought that i could read a book during the lesson because i was sure i wouldn`t understand a word. well, the topic of the lesson seemed to be german literature, schiller`s wilhelm tell. the teacher came in and it appeared that the lesson was not going to be about schiller so much, rather it was a lesson about war. strange. anyway, he saw me of course but he also seemed to know that i was present. as a german literature (and other topics) professor he spoke some german himself, so i had my first chance at a german conversation for a while. he had all students shout "willkommen, patrick" (welcome) and after that from time to time he summarized in german what he was talking about to the students. he even wrote some german summaries on the blackboard, cool huh. the lesson itself was pretty unorthodox, too. he`d jump from discussing a picture of japanese soldiers during ww2 to a scene from the anime gundam to playing a live performance of bruce springsteen and analyzing the lyrics of that. at the end everyone had to write down his thoughts of the lesson. then masayuki and me went to the kiyomizu temple. 2 years ago we went there on our oneday trip to kyoto and i really loved the place. my camera batteries were dead by that time and i ende3d up not having any photos of the place that i liked the most. plus the weather was kinda bad, but it didn`t bother me all that much. this time the weather was not bad at all. in fact today was the warmest day since i got here, i think, and it has been pretty hot all the time. at times it was almost unbearable, especially since we had to walk about 2km from the university, steadily uphill since the temple is about 150 meters above the city with a particularly nice view. the temple itself was awesome, even though there were many tourists. i made sure to take a lot of pictures. after that, we went to some shops as i had asked. i bought another book from murakami (surprise surprise, but the choice of english books is extremely limited in this country), a cd by king crimson (the debut) and another few used hikaru no go mangas. awesome! (money will be updated later, don`t have the price tag here)