Bikes and Scooters!

This one's for Daddy! :D These are some pictures of the bike-parking-place near my station. A lot of people ride those scooter things, and even more people ride bikes. You see every kind of person riding bikes. Old men, mothers with a 4-year-old in a basket thing on the back and a 2-year-old in another seat on the handle bars, women wearing skirts, business men in suits, and students in uniform. So, I think it's safe to assume that they have places like this at pretty much every station.

And a note about the scooters. Even though I am pretty sure it's not legal, they always go in between or along the side of the cars on busy streets. Especially at stoplights or in heavy traffic. And occasionally you see people zip up onto the side walk and then back onto the street to avoid waiting for a red light. What is it with these scooter people?! They just think the rules don't apply to them or something!

And yes, I go past here every day in the bus. Every time I pass it I think, "I should take a picture of this for Dad. He likes to see these kinds of things." It only took me 5 months to finally walk back the 2 minutes and take some pictures. Mostly because I am usually in a hurry to get to the station and because you look rather stupid taking pictures of all the bikes. haha



The first half or so is bikes, and the back half is scooters. What an awful place to forget where you parked.

I love you, Daddy!

Kakezome

Japanese people have a lot of traditions around the new year. A lot of the cultural, special, or in some aspects of their culture, "sacred" things they do are extra special when they do it for the first time in the new year. Calligraphy is no exception to that. The first calligraphic writing of the year is called a kakezome. Usually it is done on the first of January, but I did mine at school. My first day back from winter break, we all did calligraphy for 2 hours and then went home. (I wasn't expecting that either. I thought we were going to have classes after calligraphy!)

This is my kakezome!


They were all submitted to a Judge (and the high-school's principal gave the one he deemed best a special award). It's possible that the principal was the judge, but I have no clue. Anyway, Last week one of my teacher's was like. "Oh! Good job on your kakezome! I was so surprised when I saw the name! It's really good!"

I was very surprised to find out that it was put in our school's art display in Queen's Square. Queen's Square is a big shopping plaza place very close to landmark tower. It is absolutely ginormous and mostly underground. The school's art was on display there for about a week so the public could come and see it. I ended up going to see it with my friend Katja (from Finland) on the 24th. The other art was amazing! There were drawings, paintings, ceramics, miniature models, and other things in addition to calligraphy. Honestly, my school has a huge amount of artistic talent. I couldn't believe these were done by middle and high school girls. Some of them looked very professional. I should have taken some pictures of the other stuff too.

Me and Katja- most, if not all, of the other kakezomes there were better than mine. I wonder if they just put it in there because I'm the exchange student.... hmm...


After the display was taken down from Queen's Square the kakezomes were put up in the entrance hall at school. I was once again surprised, and pleased to find out that I had gotten a bronze prize for it! This is the first time I've ever won an award for something artistic. Which might have something to do with the face that my drawing abilities haven't improved much since third grade. Yeah, stick people (and animals!) are about all I can do. I'm not sure how the prizes work. There was one special award from the principal, maybe a couple golds, a few silvers, and probably 10 or so bronzes. I'm so proud of myself! :D

Okay, this is not a good picture of me at all, but you can see the prize on the side of my kakezome.

These kanji together don't exactly make a sentence, but rather give the viewer an image. If they understand the kanji, that is. From top to bottom, the kanji have the following meanings: remainder, leftover, balance; snow; brightness, light; tall, high, expensive; summit, peak. The last two together mean "high mountain" or "lofty peak".

*note. These are the old kanji. Today, they are written a little differently.

The image that I came up with, which was actually very similar to my host mom's, is a high mountain peak from a little distance, with the snow glittering in the sunlight of a spring day, maybe at dawn.

My host dad gets the image of almost the same thing, but he thinks it is at night with the mountains silhouetted againts a moon-lit sky. And you can see the snow on the mountain peaks in the moonlight.

I think eveyone's image is slightly different. It's pretty likely that this is a line in an old chinese poem and if you read the whole poem, you'd get a more accurate view of what image the writer was trying to describe.