Did you know that Kyoto City has a one-day bus pass you can buy instead of paying for every ride?

A one-day pass for the Kyoto City Bus

This is quite practical for tourists, as 240 yen for a ride really isn't that cheap. With the bus pass you pay 500 yen, and you can ride as many times as you want during that day within the city (note that some outskirts areas such as Arashiyama is not included in the ticket).

In Kyoto you pay for the bus ride when you get off the bus, and if you want a one-day pass you can simply say "ichinichi jyoshaken kudasai" (一日乗車券下さい) to the bus driver.

Those of you who've read my previous post know how I tried out hosting a girl through Couchsurfing.org for the first time this weekend, and how it ended up with my guest forcing herself to stay longer than originally planned despite me already having other plans.


As I suspected, about thirty minutes after I finished the previous blogpost she called me, and said she had found a place to stay for the night in Kyoto. I was relieved, and thought I finally would get rid of her, but again she had other things in mind.
I met up with her another half an hour later, and it turned out that the place she had found not was for this evening, but instead for the following night (although I'm suspecting that she in reality is off to Osaka instead). She told me a straight lie about how she had searched CS for other hosts, without any luck. I asked her when she had done this, and she replied "sometimes in the middle of the day". Just too bad for her that I already had checked her CS-account, and it stated she hadn't been online for 23 hours.


So, as the clock was close to 11 pm I had no choice but letting her stay with me one last night. I guess that had been her plan all along.. >.<

And so ends my first (and probably last) experience with CS! What a waste of time and energy. >.<

Luggage left in my room by a couch-surfer.. ><

So.. It seems that I'm going to have a one-year break from Japan, because I got accepted into Kyung Hee University's Graduate Institute of Peace Studies through Ritsumeikan University's Double Master Degree Program! (Not to mention that I'm apparently the first Ritsumeikan-student ever going to the Korean school through this program^^)
Here I'm going to follow their program in International Political Science (Peace and Global Governance Studies), and thus when I graduate from Ritsumeikan next year I'll have two master degrees (if everything goes as planned).

Yay, me so happy :3

Stay in tuned for my year in Korea! xD

Kyung Hee University in Korea

The coolest T-shirt on campus!! "A camera is a device which is used to take photos of a motif"

I got contacted again by Lycée a little while ago and asked if I wanted to come back and do some more modeling for them. The thing is, this beauty parlor has a number of hair salons in Osaka and Kobe, and are constantly looking for foreigners interested in hair modeling. Here are a couple of pictures from my last session:



And here is Lycée's blogpost about the photo shoot.
As I wrote in my previous post, Lycée is always looking for foreigners who might be interested do modeling for them, so if you happen to be in the area and also are in the need for a free haircut, then you could always contact them through their web page.

ゆうまちゃん！今日1年間半の記念日になったね。早かったなぁ〜。

一緒に遊んだり、トレーニングしたり、旅行したり、パーティーしたりして、めっちゃいい思い出いっぱいできた。辛い時もあったけど、ゆうまちゃんはずっとそばにいてくれたから心強かった。日本ではいい経験山ほどあるけど、やっぱりゆうまちゃんと出会ったのはそのなかの最もよかったことだと私は思う。今は遠距離でちょっと寂しいけど将来もゆうまちゃんと一緒にいたいから東京で仕事を見つけるために精一杯頑張る。

ゆうまちゃん大好きやで〜！ヤイ　アー　シェンペグラー　イ　ダイ♡


関係あるポスト：
日本語あり

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平等院

A 10-yen coin, depicting the Byodo-in temple

Another picture of Byodo-in

A machine producing tea

You can buy green tea in different qualities

Uji-tea

Uji is proud of its tea

Time for green tea ice-cream

Starting point of the traditional Japanese streets

Genji and one of his ladies

Totally random: a phone booth with a phoenix on top..

Another Genji-statue by the river

Enjoying lunch by the river

Uji Jinja

Flute performance

Group picture with the nice Japanese lady

A colorful group of students.. ^^

Café Frosch!

The Café Frosch logo is so cute:)

3 year anniversary flowers

Kayo-san is fixing the technical details before the party can begin

One of the items on sale for the evening: delicious fruit

..And not to mention the anniversary cake.. Which all of us wanted to eat straight away!

My co-workers doing their best to prepare the food for the evening

Performances in the café

Café Frosch was totally packed with guests!!

We even had a dancing performance!

Alex and My, the MCs for the evening!

Group picture after all the guests (and many of the staff too..) had left. お疲れさん〜！！

The evening turned out to be a great success (as expected;p)! We run out of the most popular beer in a blink of a second, and the food followed soon after as well. Great performances, great food, great guest.. What else can I say.?! I think all of the guest were both full and happy when they left that evening.
Thanks to Kayo-san and Café Frosch for a lovely evening:)! これからも宜しく〜☆


And finally: A video of Fuigodza, one of the bands who performed for us on Saturday:

With the price reduction system its nicer to try out new things

About a month ago I moved to a new apartment, and the place couldn't have been better: I'm the nearest neighbor to the local Kyoto Coop grocery store. Although the prices of their groceries don't vary that much compared to their competitors I have discovered that they give pretty nice discounts at the end of the day. Every day between 7 and 7:30 pm some of the employees walk around in the store giving out waribiki for different kinds of products. They start with small reductions, but depending on the product things that haven't been bought by around 19:25 end up being sold for half price. One can thus save quite a lot of money (or alternatively affording to eat more than normally) just by going to the store at the right time. As a student living abroad with more or less no income it is particularly nice to be able to get a little price reduction, haha..