Hello all!
I’m sorry that I didn’t get this published yesterday — it was 2:00 in the morning before we got back from our celebratory karaoke session, and I’ve never been a night owl! Yesterday was the day of our final presentations in Kyoto. I was a bit nervous for this as all of the wonderful teachers and mentors that we’ve had this week would be in attendance.
I woke up in the morning and went with some of the others to a department store called Loft. They had some really nice pens and fancy copic markers, but it was all so expensive! I have to admit that everything was really fun to look at though. After walking around a bit more, Frankie and I headed over to the Terminal Kyoto where our final presentations would be taking place. We got a teensy bit lost on the way, but were thankfully able to get our bearings and get to the right place on time! We then rehearsed our presentations before taking another walk to de-stress before the gathering would start. During this walk, we finally accomplished a silly goal that we’d been toying with all week — we went to see what a McDonald’s looks like in Japan! Compared to my experience of McDonald’s in the US, it was pretty darn fancy! However, they didn’t serve McChickens, so how fancy could it be, really? Anyway, after our jaunt to the McDonald’s, we returned to give our presentations. Both of the wonderful instructors we’ve had this week on the art of Zen were at the presentation, so I was really nervous to speak, but they seemed to enjoy what we said! I feel that we’ve learned so much in these past days that it was really difficult to squeeze all of our experiences down into a relatively short presentation format. At any rate, it went well and we were able to have a very enjoyable dinner afterward! With Kagaya-sensei’s help in translating, I was able to have a conversation with Kei-san, our Zen instructor, who has kind of become my hero during this trip. That was really fun!
After dinner, we all headed out to do some karaoke! My one previous experience with karaoke was a small machine in a crowded room at a science olympiad or forensics meet in middle school. This experience was completely different! We were able to book a small room to sing our hearts out in for a couple hours. (Thankfully the room was soundproofed, and no one outside of our little group had to listen to my caterwauling.) It was a lot more fun than I expected, and I actually knew a good majority of the songs that people picked to sing! I may not be able to carry a tune in a ten gallon bucket, but I sure enjoyed myself!
I think that that was it for yesterday… I should have today’s post up in a little bit!
-Breelyn
