It's better to have left your house key at the bus stop than on the bus. At least then I was able to get off at the next stop, run back to my stop, get it, and power walk through the "mushi atsui" weather - essentially hot and humid - to work.
I learned that typhoons and hurricanes are cyclones, they just differ in location. Typhoons happen in Japan. It's approximately typhoon season. Weeee! It's supposed to happen in the next few days- I'll post pictures if it does!
I got Sriracha sauce from iherb.com, a magic place that ships foreign goods, and all of my other spices have become obsolete. The first time I opened it, I got a whiff of the smell. A little bit of my history with Sriracha: I ate it a lot in college. It could go on anything. Then, I worked at an "Asian fusion" restaurant that had it for people to use. The process of opening new bottles and refilling the old nightly gave me a bit of a repulsion to the smell. Since people don't treat things at restaurants as their own, there was always dried sauce on the top that you had to wipe off or something else that was just not pleasant. I did not expect these feelings to resurface when I first opened it, but I immediately thought I had made a huge mistake. Luckily, I tried eating it (which I never did at the restaurant) and it tasted just as good as I remembered.
I went to the Yaegaki Shrine which is one of the most well-known at least of the area. Side note: I am never quite sure how well-known things are in Japan because I almost never hear about anything anywhere else. Many things are referred to as well-known or famous. Anyway, Yaegaki Shrine has a very interesting story to go with it. First, the whole shrine is about finding love, solidifying relationship bonds, and procreation. There are many statues shaped like male genitalia, especially placed in parts of nature that are very suggestive to certain acts of passion. When you go to the shrine, you are supposed to buy a fortune and take it to the pond in the woods behind the shrine. The pond is supposed to be one where a goddess used to apply her makeup when the gods and goddesses walked the land. So you take your fortune, which looks mostly just like a thin white sheet of paper, to the pond and put it in the water with a coin on top. When you put the paper in the water, a special ink stands out on the paper and your fortune appears. When you put the paper in the water, you start a timer. If the paper and coin sink within 5 minutes, you will find your love soon. If it floats away from you, your love is far away from you. My fortune said essentially that I will be fortunate in life and that my love is northeast of me, and my paper sunk close to me and just after 5 minutes. Love: look out. Here comes Vanessa.
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| Main entrance of Yaegaki Shrine |
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| A mini shrine on the main grounds. You may notice the emphasis on - ahem - physical relations. |
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| My fortune in the pond! |
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| In front of the pond while others patiently wait their fate. |
This past weekend I wandered around my neighborhood and came across a temple that Lafcadio Hearn, a famous poet who lived in Matsue for a time, enjoyed visiting. After that, I discovered a new coffee shop that plays movies every night. Although the weather was similar to an Arkansas summer, I had a really pleasant time walking around and looking at things. It sounds cliche, but it is easy to forget to appreciate where you are. I think it is important to go walking around the city you are, seeing it for what it really is, and appreciating it. After all, there is only one of it.
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| Main entrance to the temple. Way to overexpose the picture, iPhone camera. |
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| I can't read Japanese so I don't know who this is, but they had multiple faces which must be significant |
