Tuesday - Entrance ceremony of the school and visit of Tennoji

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Today was the beginning of the new life... The school was finally starting 😊

This morning I had to meet the class at the school building in order to go all together in the south of the city to Abeno-Kunin center for the entrance ceremony. This center is like a big hall with chairs with a stage (a bit like a theater). We were around 300 people and straight from the beginning, everyone was fighting to see the sheets on the wall where were written our classes and time schedule (morning or afternoon).

No surprise for me, I am in the beginner class which is in the morning YAY! In my class, there is Fanny, Rebecca, one Indonesian girl...and the rest is from Taiwan or Korea lol. The class is about 18 students, which seems a good number.

Then the ceremony started. We had to stand, bow and sit at least 10 times during the ceremony while teachers and students from previous years were talking. Funny enough, even if there is a lot of beginners, no word in English was said :P So we sat there quietly trying to understand what we could and after 1 hour and a half, we were free.

Being in the south of the city (quite far), it was a good occasion to stay there and visit Tennoji (the close neighborhood). As we were hungry, we directed ourselves to Shin-sekai (the new world) which is basically an old amusement park turned into a lively block of buildings. It is really colorful and you can find there a lot of small restaurants and shops to buy anything... You can still fill the atmosphere of amusement park even tho there is no rides anymore.

After eating, we stayed a bit in Shin-sekai to see the surrounding area, and then we were on our way to Shitennoji, an old temple.

This temple was consisting in one big tower and some smaller buildings next to it. As well a big Tori-gate is at the entrance of the temple which gives a really traditional touch to the area. Inside the courtyard, was a book flea-market, where it seems you could find anything you want from religious books to cooking books.

We managed to get inside the tower, and an old guy told us that there was a finger of Buda in the artifact at the top. Then he said there is 1 finger of Buda in every temple in Japan. And as I can believe Buda was powerful, as a man he could only have 10 fingers, so that doesn't match with the 1000+ temples in Japan :P but it is still a nice story 😊

As it was nice weather, we decided to walk home, which was quite far (a good hour walk), but fortunately, on the way, we found another temple, Isshin-Ji, or the Common people temple.

Beside being a nice temple, this temple has 1 unique particularity. It seems that people are bringing to the temple the ashes from the dead of their family. Then, with this ashes, the temple creates statues of Buda named Okotsubutsu. One Okotsubutsu is made from the ashes of 200 000 people, and there is now 13 Okotsubutsu which represent 2.5 million people. As this story is incredible, it is still true, and that is why many people are coming to this temple to pay respect to their ancestors.

One our way home with David (the Spanish guy) we had some fun about how he actually got in the next level class talking almost no Japanese, and I wished him good luck for the first day of class as I went home.

At home, I ate some gyozas bought on the market nearby, and after talking a bit with everyone, I went to bed as all the others were planing to get drunk and party. But tomorrow is my first day of class and I don't want to miss it, so I passed on this one 😊

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