Nakau te!!!

Today, I got up early and went to language class with watanabe sensei. It is moving pretty quick. We are learning a lot. I will definitely need to be practicing a lot outside of class too. We had studio today and we have a design project already. In pairs, we are to design a small retail or restaurant infill in teh shopping arcade near our hotel. It is two stories and Zach and I are doing a restaurant with a retail space above. The site is literally only 11 feet wide. It will definitely be an interesting little event. We have already somewhatdesigned it in sketchbook. We present initial ideas and some work on Friday and the project is due on Wednesday. For lunch, we went to Nakau. You order your meal from a vending machine, then take the ticket to your seat and they come by and grab it to put your order in in the kitchen. Then they bring your food to you. I had a big bowl of udon with a side of rice that had chicken and egg with some sort of sauce on top. The meal was pretty cheap. It was very filling. After studio and everything we swung by the site of our project. Then we grabbed some stuff from Loft and we looked around at Muji. I was able to refrain from buying anything this time but there were a few pens calling to me. When I got back, I did my language homework which consisted of translating a bunch of english sentences to hiragana. I got to use some sweet paper with boxes on it instead of lines and write from top to bottom. The exercises in the book are very helpful for learning the hiragan. I know a fair amount now. Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll know the hiragana very well. While I worked on my language stuff, I had a beer that I picked up at Kyoto station. It's called white nile. Apparently, Kyoto and Tokyo universities teamed up and deciphered some ancient egyptian beer brewing recipe and created some beers in that fashion. The beer was pretty good. Not very cloudy for a white, but I enjoyed it. Tomorrow, we head to Nara to see some Buddhist temples. It should be pretty cool. It's another early day with lots of walking so wish me luck. Lots of good pictures from Nara will probably be in the next post.