Back to Stuff in Kyoto - Cat Cafes and More! (3/1/13)

Hi everybody,

We are back from Tokyo! Whew that was exhausting! David is still sleeping – namakemono that he is (lazy bum) or maybe he is depressed from all the rejection of the past few days haha

So yesterday we went to a cat café – so cute! It’s a café where you can pet kitties! It’s great to relieve stress. They are so friendly…well if you are not a human foreigner. They didn’t like David very much. But I enjoyed it! So fluffy (like me)!

Hello Mr. Kitty!

Then we went to Karaoke and got this big room – it was like a party room! It was a lot of fun – My friend Mariko and I enjoyed watching all the guys try to dance AKB48. Oh and David? He was then by the door (he can’t read push/pull haha).

RJ and I are at Karaoke!

Oh but the best part was when we went to Kyo Eki (Kyoto Station) for our last pop culture field trip. We recently watched the movie Tampopo – a movie about ramen (and other aspects of Japanese food culture). So we went to Ramen Alley – a large collection of ramen restaurants that represent all the different regions of Japan (each place has it’s own type of ramen – just like how Boston and NY have different pizzas and hot dogs).

But then after lunch we did a group survey about keitai denwas (cell phones). We were supposed to ask locals different features about how they use cell phones. David and his friends tried to talk to a group of obaachans (grandmas) but they all ran away…rejected! I was able to find a group of high school girls to talk to and we talked about decorations (like keychains and covers), emoji (emoticons and face images like ^-^), ryakugo (abbreviations), rules for using (like don’t talk on the train), and cell phone games/apps. My favorite app is LINE – it’s a texting app that is popular in Japan. You can send these cute stickers to people too – of course there’s animal stickers – I like the panda and the bear and the bunny! And as long as you have wifi or 3g internet – you can call internationally for free!

These are the LINE characters!

At first it was scary to approach people and talk in Japanese, but after we started talking, it was really fun! The people were so nice (well to me anyways…lol)!

-Sumi