Tuesday I took one more step towards becoming a Buddhist. (for those of you who can't tell, I'm joking)
There are certain monks who live on Mt. Hiei who take a vow to walk for 12 years. Every year they walk 100-200 days in a row, each day for anywhere from 8-22 hours. In the 12th year they come down from walking around the mountain and they walk around the city of Kyoto. They start in the morning at 10:30 and walk until 5:30. Then they perform rituals and sleep a little and get up and do it again at night. There is usually one monk per decade who does this vow. Right now the current monk is on his last year, and is consequently walking around Kyoto. I joined him for the day trip on Tuesday. My religion teacher and I went, dressed all in white. It was a long walk, but punctuated by frequent stops at shrines and temples to pray to the gods and recite the Heart Sutra. During the walk I got to talk to many lay people and monks who were accompanying the ajari. It was a good way to learn more about the special characteristics of another aspect of Japanese religion.

I now have three jobs. One of them is teaching English to small groups of kids. I thought that I knew Japanese pretty well until I tried to talk to little kids. The grammer and vocabulary is all different, and in my role as a teacher, I have to learn how to say, "Sit down. Repeat after me. I'll ask the questions, and you answer." This sounds like it should be simple, yet I can't seem to get it right. Good thing I am supposed to be talking all the time in English. However, they can't understand English, so nothing would get done if I did that. It's a bit frustrating, but for $40 an hour, I'm not complaining too much.

It is Golden Week in Japan right now. This is a period of 5 or so days out of which 3 are holidays. So, in order to keep salarymen from overworking and schoolchildren from going crazy, the other two days become unofficial holidays. Schools and companies have the whole week off, and everyone goes on vacation. If you wanted to go somewhere, you should have gotten your tickets months earlier. Today is actually Kodomo no Hi. Kid's Day. It used to be Boys Days. Celebrate today by wearing traditional armor, eating special candy and singing songs about carp.