Justin-Klein.com – Life of a Traveling Programmer

Cobweb and Torii

Yay! I’ve got my readers back! Thanks to all of you for commenting on my last post, sorry for the lack of responses – I’ve been slackin’ with keeping in touch with everybody recently…Busy, busy, busy! But I finally did get around to going through the nearly 500 megs of pictures I’ve taken over the last few weeks, and I pulled out a bunch more of what I consider to be the better ones.

Kiyomizu Dera light-up

You probably noticed that I’ve stopped maintaining the “gallery” section of my site…once I really got out and started exploring Japan it became far too tedious to sort and upload so many of my pictures, so from now on I’ll most likely just be posting them here on the main page. That way I can focus more on getting 10 or 15 of the ones I really like up rather than 30 mediocre ones. Here’s another picture of the spectacular Kiyomizu Dera light-up – much clearer than the one I came up with for the last post!

I’ll bet that Rits student doesn’t even know why his shirt is funny.

So, why have I been so busy lately anyway? Well, class at Rits has finally started, and I have to say I’m pretty damned pleased. I placed into C class (classes range from A to E), much higher than I would’ve expected considering my comparatively little experience with the language. At times I feel like I may have gotten in a bit over my head, as the classes are taught entirely in Japanese and I probably understand about as much as I don’t, but I guess this is a good thing – hopefully with time my comprehension will go way up. Plus my grammar classes only have four students: Shivana, Hidy, Dylan and I. Talk about individual attention!
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Shinkyo (sacred bridge) in Nikko

Ah, Nikko. A place I’ve been wanting to visit since the first time I came to Japan, but have had neither the time nor the money to do so. Neither of those limitations have changed, but I figured that I’m not up in Tokyo all that often and it’s OK to splurge every now and then 🙂

Unfortunately the weather was far too cold for us to hit the area as hard as we’d initially planned. The rain and remaining patches of snow certainly ruled out our plans of checking out Nikko’s famous outdoor Onsen. But we weren’t sure if they’d let us in with Ron’s tattoos anyways.

A shot inside the Tosho-gu shrine complex

Nikko itself was exactly what I expected – an overwhelmingly tourist-oriented town with an overwhealming amount of natural beauty and history. It was first established as a sacred site by a traveling priest in the eighth century, but didn’t achieve fame until it was chosen as the final resting place of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the most powerful warlord in the history of Japan. In 1603, Ieyasu established the shogunate which would rule Japan for 250 years right up until the Meiji Restoration, when the country finally opened its borders up for international trade.
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