I think I really underestimated how quickly the time would go. It's already time to leave Kanazawa, and I've been having such a great time, graduation and ending ceremonies really sneaked up on me.

Today we had the closing ceremony/party, and received our certificates for having completed the Princeton in Ishikawa program. If there's anything I consistently forgot to write about, it was that--how much I enjoyed this program, especially the teachers. At Yale especially, the teachers were what really made learning Japanese so pleasant for me, and here it was no different. Both the teachers and the staff of the building had a huge impact on my experience, I think. I even picked up some of my teachers' speaking patterns. They really dedicated a lot of time, effort, and patience to us, especially in times when the students run out of exactly those things.

The party we had was also great; each class had to give a little presentation, so my class decided to present some humorous haiku we'd written together. Nobody could show up the 2.5 year students, though, who'd rewritten a song by a popular group with lyrics about Princeton in Ishikawa.

Melia and I also performed our bhangra routine, which the parents and teachers seemed to like (hopefully). We had fun doing it, at any rate!

Someone snapped a photo of us!

Right now, I'm at Tommy's host family's house, where I was invited to eat dinner. He and his host mother are really close, and she's very sad to see him go, although she's getting another student to host tomorrow.

Here's the two of them, playing a duet on the piano together.

Anyway, it's almost time for me to go home now, and tomorrow I leave Kanazawa to travel with three other Yalies for a few days. We plan on going first to Tokyo, then to Kyoto, then to Osaka, where I'll be flying from. Hopefully I'll get around to posting in what is sure to be a hectic time, but if not, I'll recap when I return to America. I'll end this before it gets too nostalgic (I'm really going to miss the friends I've made here! That might be the hardest thing about leaving, that I won't get to see those kids every day, as I've been doing for the last two months).

All right, catch you later! 

SO I'M IN TOKYO with friends Monica, and Nicole.

We've been having a perfect, wonderful, incredible time full of rainbows and sparkles.

We took a bus from Kanazawa right after class, putting us in Tokyo about 9pm. So we mostly rested the first night, and today we ran around Akihabara, mostly, which is pretty much the anime/manga nerd capital of the world. We spent a horrifying amount of money on merch (aka merchandise, goods related to anime/manga that we like).

Being in Tokyo is really different from Kanazawa. My time in Kanazawa has definitely been great, but there are things that are difficult to get used to--especially being stared at all the time. But in Tokyo, there are so many foreigners that I can walk around being noticed almost as little as I'm noticed at home. No one is surprised to see the three of us, and we've been seeing a lot of other foreigners. I can definitely understand Tokyo's appeal as a place to live for foreigners, even over Osaka, where there were less foreigners, I think. It's been a really pleasant break from Ishikawa, I think.

Plus there are so many amazing things to see and do in Tokyo! From blue-haired salarymen, to super cheap udon, to giant posters of my favorite anime:

Here's Akihabara!

Here's a picture of the anime Black Butler in Akihabara, which is getting a new season this summer.

We went to a whole slew of places: pretty much every Animate (a large store of anime and manga merchandise) in Tokyo, Akihabara's Mandarake (a similar store), and ate all the cheap, great food they had to offer:

Here's some 500円 ramen, a close second to the 230円 we had this morning.

We're completely exhausted, so I'll end this here. We also have plans to visit Harajuku and Shimokitazawa tomorrow!

This week was a little less eventful. After the Noto trip, everyone was pretty tired. The day we returned to class, Tuesday instead of Monday, we had a lecture on traditional Japanese music. It was pretty dry, and everyone was sleepy from traveling that weekend. The lectures tend to be hit-or-miss, though. I'd say that this was my least favorite so far, but some I've enjoyed include the first lecture we attended, about a foreign person who gained fame in Japan for the clever poetry he wrote. Fortunately, though, this lecture ended on a high note. They'd brought a traditional costume, and asked for a volunteer from the class to try it on. I was able to snap this picture of Jared:

On another high note, Melia and I, in our ever-continuing quests for better and better food, found some great cheap restaurants in Kanazawa. One of the goals we made at the Light Fellowship meeting before arriving in Japan was to become a regular at a restaurant in Japan. I'm not sure if we've managed to become regulars at any one place, but we've been very good about exploring different places to eat around the city. Speaking of food, however, this week I and some friends were asked to have our pictures taken for a brochure about transfer students. We were told we'd be paid in sandwiches, but instead we were paid in these absolutely beautiful bento boxes:

In other exciting news, we have a three-day weekend coming up, and I'm planning on going to Tokyo with two other friends I made in the program! We all love anime and manga, so it'll probably be a nerd's dream. Stay tuned...

Finally, we just returned from the trip to Noto! I'm exhausted but I'll try to recount all the things we did to the best of my ability.

This trip was to far more places than I anticipated--we took a roundabout route both going and coming, in order to visit a bunch of different notable places in Noto. We had been split up into groups of three or four, and each group had been assigned a different place to give a 発表(presentation) about. My presentation was about a place called キリコ会館、a lantern museum.

Here are some pictures I took of some of my favorite places where we stopped:

We got to stop on a long beach, one that cars were allowed on, unlike most beaches in the US.

We gave our presentations on the bus--this was Melia's group.

We also got to stop at a really beautiful shrine, where everyone walked around and took a lot of pictures together and got eaten alive by bugs.

 There were many graves, there, too.

 After we spent about an hour there, we went to lunch, which was spectacular, as usual. One thing I can say for certain is that I've never wanted for good food in this program. Love you too, Princeton in Ishikawa

Or maybe I'm just easily pleased?

We had lunch right next to a beach, so we all played in the sand and water for a while before getting back on the bus. The next place we stopped was another beach, but this one was rocky and mountainous with bridges and lots of interesting rock formations. One of the people in the program got injured on these rocks, though, when he tried to take a swim (I kid you not).

Then, at last we arrived at the hot spring! I'd been looking forward to this all month, especially after wanting to visit a hot spring for several years. This hot spring was actually one that was famous throughout Japan, and we understood why once we saw it. It was absolutely gorgeous.

Here's a picture of the lobby!

First, we sat down in our room for a while, which was a Japanese style room, with a table and cushions on the floor. We were served a little jelly snack, and green tea, but the hotel staff. Then, they dressed us all in yukata, and we went down to dinner, which was unreal. It was a several course meal, and we were even entertained! I'll probably never experience something so fancy ever again, so naturally I was ecstatic the whole time.

Here's a picture of the meal!

Here's a picture of the hotel staff dancing for us during dinner!

According to my host parents, when you go to a hot spring, you should bathe three times: once before you eat, once after you eat, and then once again in the morning. This is exactly what I did; I wanted to get the most out of my first hot spring experience. It was amazing. There were so many baths, and a sauna. It was also a great place to bond and talk with friends from the program.

The next day, we left the hot spring early after a wonderful breakfast, in order to visit a couple more places in Noto. My presentation was about a museum that displayed enormous lanterns carried in annual まつりin Noto. The lanterns were even bigger than I expected, though:

Everyone was a bit tired, though, so we moved a little more slowly that day. Some other great places we visited were a museum of lacquerware, an outdoor market, and a little museum that showed us how salt in the region was made. In all, I'm quite tired, but the weekend was incredibly fun and I had an amazing time!

Later in the week, some friends and I decided to take a walk down to Higashichaya, the historically preserved geisha district nearby. It was about a 30 minute walk, or a short bus ride, but the day was so pleasant we decided to walk. Higashichaya was absolutely beautiful, especially for fans of the more traditional side of Japan. The buildings were mostly made of wood, and behind them loomed a picturesque mountain.

Walking down one of the main streets

It was early and we didn't have any solid plans for the evening, so we wandered around slowly and stopped in several shops. One was a souvenir shop, but the most interesting was one selling gold leaf (緊迫）artifacts. Gold leafing is a traditional craft which Kanazawa is famous for. We couldn't take pictures of the things in the shop, but some of the most memorable were compacts with gold leafing on them, and chocolate cakes with flakes of gold baked into them (gold leaf is apparently edible). However, behind the shop was a building covered entirely in gold leaf, which I fortunately was allowed to take a picture of:

After that, we wandered around in a near-fruitless search for food, before ending up in town again.

A couple of days later, though, I had one of the most memorable meals of my life--it was the program's first long weekend, and I decided not to go anywhere. On Saturday night, there was a dinner with locals from Kanazawa we could go to, preceded by a cultural exchange. The cultural exchange part was mostly just everyone sharing a little about their hometowns, and then getting to know each other, before getting to the part we were all really interested in: this incredible meal.

We were served tea and a sweet first, while we were waiting for the room to open up. It was very pretty:

It also tasted great, of course. When we entered the room we'd be dining in, we saw that a small tray had been set up for each of us individually, with appetizers and drinks already set up. That was only the beginning--it was something like a five-course meal. I was in food heaven.

The fish in the center of the floor there was a very special fish, usually eaten at formal occasions like weddings. It was stuffed, and the most delicious part of the fish was the head, which we all played rock-paper-scissors to get to eat. Guess who won (spoiler alert: it was me).

I mean, of course every day the food here is incredible, but that was a night I'll remember for a long time.

After the sleepover at Nicole's house and how much fun it was, soon other people wanted to host events at their host family's houses as well. Another good friend I made named Lucy Rubin decided to host an event after that, a soba-making afternoon! Her host father made soba for a living, so he generously offered to give a lesson in how to make noodles to about six people after class one day. The seven of us--Nicole, Thaddeus, Kat, Harriet, Jared, Lucy, and I--took the bus and then the train together to her house.

Lucy's host father started us on rolling out the dough for soba into a circle, with rolling pin. We all took a try (while I attempted candid shots).

Harriet was the first to try!

Lucy's host dad watches Harriet.

We rolled the circle of dough over and over, with bigger and bigger rolling pins until it became quite thin.

Then Lucy's host dad showed us how to cut the dough into thin slices, which would become noodles once boiled. He used a large, heavy knife that honestly looked pretty intimidating. He cut extremely quickly, so that all the noodles were almost exactly even in size. It was way harder than it looked, as we soon discovered as all of the noodles we cut were thick and uneven.

Fortunately a silly thing like that doesn't affect the taste, which was spectacular! The meal we had, which consisted of the soba we had made, a salad made from vegetables grown by Lucy's host parents, and potato salad, was amazing. It made me a little homesick, though, since my grandmother also grows vegetables so we can prepare them together in salads.

Here's a picture of the salad!

After we all ate together, Lucy's host parents surprised us with dessert, fruit in jelly that I ate so quickly I didn't manage a picture (dessert is one of my many weaknesses). The jelly was lychee flavored, I believe, a delicious end to a delicious afternoon. 

The next incredible thing that happened was a sleepover at my friend's house--and this truly was the stuff dreams are made of. We did pretty much all the Japanese summer activities I've always wanted to do, it was just perfect.

First, some background--I made this absolutely wonderful, marvelous, wise, nerdy, brilliant friend here by the name of Nicole. We'd been getting along quite well in the past few weeks, and she decided to host a bunch of friends at her host family's house for a sleepover. Nicole's host family happens to be quite wealthy, but we were in no way prepared for the evening we got to spend at this house.

Her host mother and her host mother's friends picked us up at the Komatsu station, and drove us to her her house. The area was also beautiful, all big rice patties and pretty houses.

We came in the house and there was so much food prepared for us: everything from sashimi to taiyaki to yakiniku. I sometimes wish I was the type of girl who ate like a bird, but that's just not who I am. I ate until I couldn't breathe. There was so, so much food, it was incredible (and it honestly would have been a waste not to indulge).

Then Nicole took us on a tour of the house. The place we would sleep was a traditional tatami room:

Nicole's also in the picture, wearing the yukata her host family lent her for the night. She looked so beautiful; she's as crazy for Japanese culture as I am so naturally all night she was on cloud nine. She's standing next to this absolutely insane golden shrine that her family owns, of which I took about a thousand pictures (because who would believe me?).

After she showed us around the rest of the house, we went outside and did はなび, fireworks, together! It's something I've seen a thousand times in anime (the most , and have always wanted to do with my friends. They were much more sparklers than fireworks, of course, but I was so, so happy. We all ran around in the dark with the different colored sparklers and pretended to cast Harry Potter spells.

One of the fireworks has a superstition associated with it: it's a small, thin sparkler that you hold at the top and light from the bottom. If the spark makes it all the way up to your fingers without going out or dropping to the ground, you'll find true love. My tiny little spark took a while to light, but was the only one to not drop or go out--looks like I'll be finding true love!

After that, we spread out our futons and talked until late into the night. I showered in their ridiculously extravagant shower, and we all fell asleep happy and full.

The next morning, though, breakfast was just as gorgeous and tasty. They even bought a huge box of macarons for us to eat after breakfast. What an awesome night. I'm still not over it.

Here's a picture of our breakfast!

Here are some more pictures of their incredible house:

Prepare for a post dump! So much has been happening in the past three weeks, and I have many drafts to publish.

The first exciting thing that happened after the Hyakumangoku Matsuri was the first 日本語テブル、which led to the first visit to the store Animate. 日本語テブル is a weekly activity we have, in which we have lunch and get to talk with 金沢大学 students. I have entirely too much fun with that. It's especially nice to get to talk to Japanese kids our own age, since the opportunity doesn't really arise outside of this activity.

One friend we made, Ken Ohki, was nice enough to show us the way to the store called Animate, which was a haven for nerd like me. 3 floors of rows upon rows of bookshelves of manga, anime/manga merchandise, fan-made comics, and figurines--it was heavenly. I've already spent a decent amount of money there. Manga's probably the best encouragement I can get to learn how to read, despite the terrifying amount of kanji I don't know. I made a solid attempt with one of the volumes I bought; it took me just under an hour to get through the first chapter (上手ですね、私)

It was a bit of a walk, though. We walked together to Korinboh, past the department store called 109 and into a narrow alleyway of clothes for the 'younger crowd.' Most importantly, I came across a thrift shop close by that I would later end up visiting many, many times. 

I still don't understand the name at all, which is Don Don Down on Wednesday. But you don't need to understand the name of a place when it has cute shoes for just 378円。I'm really getting spoiled by this place.

We also went into Starbucks for the first time, which was somehow even more expensive than American Starbucks's. Not only do they have the same strange sizing system as the Starbucks in America (Tall, Venti, other things I don't remember) they have an even smaller size, termed "Small," which is generally more expensive than the American "Tall" size. The only thing I recommend trying is this interesting coffee jelly drink they have available, which I managed to swing for free when a friend tried it and didn't like it.

So yes, as you can see, the adventures continue ^_^

Wow, so much has happened in a little over a week! Where do I even start?

Well, first of all, here I am in Kanazawa! We got here on a train called the Thunderbird. The ride was so pleasant and smooth, but stupidly expensive--about 7200 yen for a one-way ticket, so that's around $72. The first night we got here, we stayed overnight in a hotel, and then we met our host families!

I'm living with a mom, a dad, and a 16-year-old daughter. The parents and I have spent some time together, but unfortunately I barely ever see the daughter. I still have high hopes of a relationship with her, but she seems very busy with school and friends. Fortunately the family liked the gifts (おみやげ) I brought them, so we're off to a good start I think!

Here's a picture of the house, the view from the table where we eat together!

Every day we eat breakfast and dinner together. The television sits right on the table, and they keep it on during meals. I've been learning all sorts of interesting things about Japan from those programs, for example, a large percentage of drug use in Japan is among working middle-aged men, as a result of a stressful life with few apparent rewards.

Today was the first full week of classes. Nobody beats the Yale senseis, but the PII senseis are coming in close second. They're charming and energetic and approachable, and spending time both inside and out of the class with them has been wonderful.

We've done so many amazing extracurriculars in this first week alone. We spent an afternoon at the Ishikawa Prefectural Government, where we received おみやげ (souvenirs) and got to go up to the top floor of the building for a beautiful view of Kanazawa:

Then we got to go to Kenrokuen Garden, one of the three most famous gardens in Japan. It was incredible, I took over two hundred pictures. We also got to attend a tea ceremony in the garden, in a traditional tea house. We drank matcha and talked and had a great time, despite the heat. It was especially hot that day. Here are a few of my favorite pictures:

Then, on Saturday was the Hyakumangoku Matsuri! The dance we practiced was way longer than I anticipated-- danced for almost three whole hours. We all wore coats called 'happi,' (はっぴ) and had sashes that we waved in the air during one dance. There were three dances in total, and many, many groups were doing them with us as we proceeded down the street. It was an oddly calming experience.

Here's Satoh-sensei!

Two senseis and some friends in this one!

The first complete week of classes have started this week, and cultural activities will start soon too. Stay tuned!

First blog post, yay! I'm Zoey Peterson, and this is my travel blog about my trip to Japan on the Light Fellowship. Prepare for feelings, struggles, and triumphs; they've already been happening and it's barely been 6 hours since I arrived.

So we're finally here! After a full two days of traveling, I've arrived here in Osaka, Japan.

I flew on Lufthansa airlines, and had an 8-hour layover in Germany. Let me first say that if you have the opportunity to fly on Lufthansa, take it. Those were the most incredible flights I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing: 7 hours from New York to Germany, and 11 hours from Germany to Japan. On each flight I was served two meals, could choose from a crazy wide selection of movies and television shows, and was given a blanket, pillow, and as many beverages as I wanted. Truly, I felt like a princess (heh).

Not to mention the opportunity to hang out at the airport in Frankfurt, even if only for a little bit. They were selling the most incredible things there-- caviar, foie gras, duck liver, all sorts of things.

I bought chocolate for myself and my host family, and some cookies in this beautiful pink tin (I couldn't help myself). There was so much chocolate too! They had several aisles in each store dedicated to it.

I was super tired on the flight from Germany to Japan, though, so I slept for more of that flight and read for the rest. The rest of the time, to be perfectly honest, I cried from happiness haha. I've wanted to go to Japan for almost half my life now, and never thought I'd have this opportunity. The last time I was this happy was probably when I got into Yale, to be perfectly honest.

Upon arriving at Kansai International Airport, I waited for a friend to arrive, after successfully communicating with the customs officers, to my excitement. That was when the struggles started--we're staying in a hotel for the night, and finding it was quite the adventure. We wandered around a lot of subway stations and blinked in horror at all the kanji we don't know. But somehow, we made it to the Osaka Dai-ichi Hotel, outside of Umeda Station. It took us like an hour and a half or so, and we were hot and tired but thrilled to pieces when we could finally check in. We also had an obnoxious amount of luggage, because well, gotta look cute. 

My friend (Melia) and I got lunch before we checked into the hotel, at this pretty random udon place underneath the hotels in the area. We had been exploring a ridiculously extensive underground labyrinth of restaurants and convenience stores, and looking for a place to eat, when we happened on this little place.

My first time eating udon! It was incredible, although that might have been helped by how hungry we were, haha. It was also stupidly cheap for such a large amount. I think I'm in love.

So we're finally here at the hotel and resting up until we go out again! Here's the view from the window:

I am happier than I've been in a long time, and can't wait to start this new journey! I've never been outside of North America before, so I can't wait to see what I'll learn from this amazing experience :)