Thursday, September 11, 2014

2014年8月2日ー4日

August 2nd:

A day of recovery for everyone. So just to let you know, my program was officially over at this point, as in I would no longer be attending the lab to do research. We all got a month to explore Japan at the end of our exchange. This means from here on, I am on vacation. Nothing special happened on August 2nd. The days I don't write much means I either did cleaning, laundry, tennis at the dorm, or some work that wouldn't entertain you all too much.

August 3rd:

A day for a brewery tour! About 8 of us got together and reserved a tour at the Suntory brewery, where they offer half an hour open bar after the tour. A bunch of the guys had gone to the Asahi brewery wearing suits.. Why? Who knows... I just went along with it, so we had about 5 of us suited up hitting the train towards Kyoto. Here are pictures from the brewery and the rest of the day.

Huge distillation tanks.

Lager tanks 
Crazy piping system.

The bottling wheel. It's too bad it wasn't running. 
At the open bar. Pretty good beers. And we made sure to kill em. 
As a side story that's just too funny not to tell, the German guy with the glasses in the picture above got pretty drunk. So after the brewery we decided to take a train to the heart of Kyoto to explore shrines and temples. He ran to try and catch the closing doors of a train and in his rush, he jumped and hit his heart extremely hard on the entrance. So hard, in fact, that he fell straight to ground from the contact. Fortunately, the girl next to him, Youngji, took him to the hospital. Pretty classic..


Meanwhile, we were looking much classier than we were acting.

Cool shrine.

伏見稲荷大社 Fushimi Inari Taisha. 

And the bug Joon found in the forest while hiking... in suits...
That is a nest of baby birds.
The whole group

It was cool how the gated trails would part like this. Almost as cool as duncan looks in that suit..
The day was unforgettable. The weather wasn't perfect but it certainly brought a mystical feel the Kyoto mountain shrine and its foresty, gated, paths. I recommend this place to anyone visiting Japan.

August 4th:

My friend Izawa from the lab was going to northern Japan to get his driver's license on the 5th, so he wanted to grab a dinner with me before I left. So I headed to the northernmost train stop, 北千里 Kita Senri, and met him, Ishizaka, and my senpai, Kariya at a small restaurant there. Boy was I in for a surprise. This place is called 栄ちゃん Ei-Chan. It's a small, rustic restaurant owned by a guy named Ei. For starters, the guy was this 5'6" guy wearing soccer socks in sandals, a large apron over shorts that made it look like he's not wearing anything under the apron, and an oversized black and white Juventus jersey under the apron. You reserve a table in his restaurant, and the guy cooks whatever he feels like cooking for you, but however much you want of it. Oh, and there cold beer on tap. Before we even went in, he stood outside and ran a couple laps back and forth in front of his restaurant to warm up for us. This guy was a character. We sat down on our table and he started serving food. It was all pretty good food, but I think the experience tops it. At one point in the meal, he came up to our table and asked Ishizaka and I to go pick up ice cream to restock his freezer. He gave us 20 bucks to do it and told us to buy ourselves our own ice cream while there too. At another point in the meal, he started rolling おにぎりOnigiri riceballs and threw them at all his customers to eat. For the guys, he made us stand against a wall in his restaurant and he would chuck them at us at high speeds. Here's a brief video.


And here's a picture of one part of the meal.

Left to right: Kariya, Izawa, and Ishizaka. And some delicious fish on the grill.
It was a nice dinner and we shared some sad goodbyes afterwards. Turns out we would see each other one more time after this.










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