Some touristy stuff and a funny encounter

Hey everybody!

So today we did some touristy stuff with the host family...we went to this area with lots of temples (but by no means isolated). It was SO SO SO crowded. Our host family said it was more crowded than usual because the weather was so nice even though it was rainy season. Anyway, we quickly stumbled through a couple of temples, and saw another bigass Buddha! Much smaller than the one in Hong Kong, but while the HK one was 10 or so years old, this one was 350 years old...so a little more impressive in that respect.

We decided to escape the crowds soon after the Buddha and hiked around a bit in the nearby hills, coming to a much nicer, quieter, more isolated shrine in the woods. That was very nice. After that we had a great lunch at a traditional noodle house, and headed on back.

Anyway, some pictures of the day can be found below. The funniest part of the day came after we got off a super-crowded train. We were part of the pack walking down some stairs when this middle-age Japanese woman started giggling and pointing at me. I thought: "here we go, finally some 'look a white boy' stuff." Because honestly, myself and my German roommate are the only white people on any given train. But I digress. She continues to laugh and point, and taps her friend in front of her on the shoulder, says something to her, points at me, and they both start laughing some more. So I say hi in Japanese ("konnichiwa") which elicits further giggles from the pair. Taking my one word in Japanese as an indication of me being fluent, the first woman turns to me and barrages me with Japanese. I reply "sorry, I don't speak Japanese." She turns back and continues to chatter excitedly with her friend. It's all still a big mystery to me, until finally as we near the base of the stairs, the woman's friend looks at me, turns both her hands palm-up in my direction and shouts: "Beautiful!" As I blushed and laughed, all I could muster was "arigato gozaimasu (thank you)," and the whole incident concluded with the two giggling women disappearing into the crowd.