Nara: Todaiji Temple and the Deer Park

Just a hop, skip, and a train away from Kyoto is the little town of Nara -- once an imperial estate, now a tourist trap with an impressive park, a national treasure temple, and hundreds of nearly-tame deer. While the town itself isn't much more than a series of signs pointing to the temple, it's well worth taking a morning to come and wander through the park and temple grounds.



One bit of advice about the deer for American tourists: Think of them the same way you do petting zoo goats. They're cute to look at and you can pet them if they'll let you, but resist the temptation to feed them or they will chase you relentlessly all the way to the temple steps.





Sometimes the glitz and kitsch of the touristy bits can distract you from the fact that Todaiji is a sacred religious site. For maximum zen impact, I recommend going alone on a weekday morning when it's a bit quieter and free of the Saturday morning revelers. The park is quite beautiful and if you stray off the beaten path a bit, you'll be able to enjoy a peaceful stroll with the deer. Also take caution if you're traveling with a tour group. Ours wanted to charge us ¥3500 (about 35 USD) to take a bus there and back; instead, we took the train for less than half that.





Always, always, always take the time to peek in gates around temple complexes and soak in the aesthetics.



This would be an awesome photo of Josh lighting incense, except that his kick-ass Rubber Soul t-shirt ended up dominating the frame. O well.



Here's an incense photo, minus the Beatles' t, to make up for the previous one.



Your day in Nara culminates with a visit to the colossal bronze Buddha who is housed in the main hall of the Todaiji complex. One of the few times in my life when I've felt that the word "colossal" was truly appropriate.

Kyoto Photo Blog

A few more photos from our painfully brief stay in Kyoto this summer...



Fushimi Inari Taisha



Hand-washing basins are part of the symbolic purification before entering the shrine. They also provide exceptional photo ops as they typically combine water, stone, wood, and light.







Fushimi Inari features a four kilometer hike up a trail arched with orange tori. An absolute must-see in Kyoto any time of year.








Kiyomizu-Dera -- Pure Water Temple



Watching other gaijin make a scene never gets old. This French guy and his buddies were doing a martial arts photo shoot in front of the main gate at Kiyomizu-Dera.



Japanese joinery is the best way to earth-quake proof your ancient wooden structure.



The Kiyomizu spring is renown for the purity of its water. Take a sip! It's lucky!







Sprucing up the temple grounds in preparation for Matsuri.


Tea house with a fantastic view.


Kinkakuji -- The Golden Pavilion



Kinkakuji and the surrounding gardens are a perfect place to go when you have a long afternoon to spend in quiet, reflective solitude. It loses a bit of its luster when you're corralling teenagers, but I was able to wander off on my own for a few minutes and enjoy a brief shot of the stillness.



Wrap it all up with a cold brew in a cozy bar, and you've got the perfect day.

Returning to Japan: Kyoto

I've been spending quite a bit of time lately talking to my little German brother, Steven, who left his life in Mannheim for a year to come to the US. After a few months back home, he's discovering what I found when I moved home from Japan. When you drop your whole life to immerse yourself in a new experience -- a school, a job, a journey -- it comes at a price. The friends you make in your new locale aren't there to bolster you up when you get home, and the time away has distanced you so completely from your old friends that they are worse than strangers. Steven's life, like mine, is now gloriously shattered by the social San Andreas of "living abroad."



We all compartmentalize our lives: work, friends, relationships, family, that crazy summer with the traveling circus; but in normal, healthy lives, we have cross-over. Our coworkers meet our friends who hang out with our boyfriends who make awkward appearances at family gatherings and so forth. Those subtle links bind our experiences together into one collective mass we call: Life. Without them, we become scattered, disjointed; instead of being multifaceted, we become multi-lived. The problem with Dissociative Life Disorder is that whatever side of your life you happen to be on becomes dominant, reducing its counterpart to that slippery, half-imagined state of dreams. Kind of like the way we all felt about Top Gun after this.



Returning to Kyoto this summer, I was a bit apprehensive. I had been away for three years, and in that time, I wasn't sure how much I had romanticized my experiences there. Kyoto was the epicenter of my life in Japan -- not just a city where I lived, but a city where I fell madly and irredeemably in love. In love with the play of light on the Kawaramachi; with the clatter of bamboo in the wind; with narrow, snaking alleyways and a thousand little bridges; with the startling white glide of a crane; with soaring orange tori and ten-story buildings dripping with neon; with the lullaby rock of subway trains; with 7-Eleven sushi and one very well-worn blue sweater. In love with a lifestyle, with a rhythm, with an aesthetic, with a man. I was afraid that returning to Kyoto might shatter its magic for me -- might flip the garish house lights on after an enchanting show.



Instead, I discovered that even my most vivid memories didn't do any more justice to this incredible city than snapshots do to a mountain range.



Kyoto embodies the best of Japan -- a deep reverence for tradition interlaced with freshness and vitality; a startling juxtaposition of nature's stillness and the steady urban buzz; a cultural character that is rich, unique, and always surprising.



I should not have worried about Kyoto disappointing me. Coming back was like coming home, not just in the familiarity of the winding streets (a maze I long ago committed to memory) but because the rhythm of the place was once the rhythm of my life, the way an old song always takes us back to ourselves. I felt this way as my students and I entered Fushimi-Inari and as we made the steep climb up to Kyomizu-dera, but more than ever I felt myself coming home in the fervent embraces of old friends, in an icy beer and a bowl of edamame, in a smokey bar at three a.m., and in the well-worn, quiet comfort of friendship that time cannot fade.

About Writing

People torture themselves in crazy, brutal, wonderful ways. I have a friend who recently rode a bicycle over 3,800 miles -- from Virginia Beach to Oregon -- just for the adventure of it. My roommate spent the last few months drinking an obscene number of protein shakes, tempting melanoma at the tanning salon, and lifting weights every night so that he could pull off a convincing Ultimate Warrior for Halloween. I also just met this guy who does Ironman triathlons; ergo, though awesome, he is also clearly insane.

My exquisite masochism is writing. It is through writing that I become utterly vulnerable. That Walter Wellesey Smith quote -- "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." -- that is writing for me. Bleeding. It is painful and draining and invasive. And yet I am irresistibly drawn to it. At three o'clock in the morning, I sit in bed and type things that no one will ever read, pieces that strip me and break me open and empty me out. And at six o'clock in the morning, I delete them for fear that someone, somewhere, someday might see them. Might see me, all broken and naked like that without even a cute pair of shoes on. Yikes.

At this point in my life, I typically write ten to fifteen pages a week. Of these, maybe 98% are a combination of lesson plans, essays for my MA classes, letters of recommendation, and work-related nonsense (like emails about who's teaching The Scarlet Letter when and who's driving whom to some up-coming conference). That leaves about one page out of fifty that I actually want to write and that gives me that delicious rush of intellectual adrenaline.

I got into teaching because I thought it would be an avenue for leading young people to this same passion -- for entrancing them with the magic of words, the powerful addiction of stories. In some ways, this has been true. My job is rich and rewarding. I love it. But I have felt, more so recently, that the greatest price of teaching writing is that I rarely have time or energy anymore to write.

But I am not old enough yet to have regrets, and since my birthday is coming soon, I am giving myself a present: time. For writing. And permission to be vulnerable.

As an example for you, dear reader, here is a piece I wrote and published on this blog about my first night in Japan. Here is what I actually wrote (and recently polished but have never before published) about the same experience:

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The tatami bites lightly into my skin, etching uniform red grooves across my shoulder blades, along the uneven ridge of spine, and down the meat of my out-stretched legs. I lie long and wide, a little castrated Vitruvian, watching the beads of sweat well up on my bare stomach, glisten, quiver, and slip noiselessly to the floor. My ribs heave. Around my head, a riot of dark curls twists into a damp halo and slowly soaks the clean, tight straw. I strain to listen, hoping to catch the shuffle of a foot or the click of a chopstick through the paper-thin walls, but there is only a vast silence beneath the coursing of blood through my own ears, the swishing rhythm of my own breath.

My damp t-shirt and jeans, shed the moment I was alone, are tossed over the solitary chair in the corner. I thought at first of running them through the washing machine, but a quick glance at the dials discouraged me; not a word is in English. Of course, even if I knew how to turn the machine on, I have no detergent, no soap. I could get my clothes wetter but not cleaner. Instead I had stripped them off, thrown them over the chair, and gotten in the shower. The water rinsed away the sweat and dust I’d gathered on my two-hour trudge from the train station, but it did nothing to relieve the trembling in my limbs. Chilled and dripping, I stepped gingerly out into the living room and realized I had no towel, no clean or dry clothes. That was when I decided to lie down on the floor.

I’ve been here — on the living room floor — for over an hour. Maybe two. Dying rays of gold play furtively along the blades of rice grass outside the open window. It must be about eight o’clock. Maybe later. I don’t really know what time the sun sets in Kansai.

“Kansai,” I whisper the word aloud, half under my breath. “Kan - sa - iiii,” I stretch it so it covers my whole tongue. It certainly sounds far from home. “I live in Kansai, the western half of Honshu,” I chirp to myself, trying to force nonchalance into a phrase that still sounds like something I’m making up. The island name, Honshu, curdles and clumps in my mouth. I try to chop the “u” short like the Japanese do, but it keeps coming out “Hon - shooo” and I feel like a stupid gaijin, a foreigner, an outsider.

Which is exactly what I am, I suppose.

I stare at the ceiling and do some quick calculations. The company sent a Kiwi to pick me up at the train station this afternoon and show me to this apartment. My apartment, which doesn't yet feel like mine. Before arriving here, we had dropped off another new recruit and then gotten a bit lost, which I estimate doubled the distance we had to walk. The station is perhaps an hour east of here on foot. We passed a grocery store en-route, but it’s maybe forty-five minutes away, and I have to keep in mind that whatever I buy, I will have to carry forty-five minutes back. It’s possible that there is a closer grocery west of here, but it’s getting dark and everything in that direction is still undiscovered country. The chewy airline chicken breast was the last thing I ate. That was… sixteen, maybe eighteen hours ago. I should have asked the Kiwi to stop for food.

Suddenly my musings grind to a halt. The Kiwi. What was his name? I don’t remember. I try to replay the moment when he approached me in the train station — khaki trousers, white shirt, open collar, loosened blue neck-tie. Cropped ginger hair. Green eyes? Grey? He must have introduced himself. I'll probably never see him again, but at the moment, he’s the only person I know in Japan. And I have no idea what his name is.

I force myself up onto my elbows. The last rays of sun stretch in through the window and glow red on my shins. I wonder if leaving the curtain open will be enough to wake me in the morning. Forty-five minutes to walk tomorrow for food. A few more to the train station and the city center where I should be able to buy a watch, laundry detergent, and a towel. Maybe twenty hours before my luggage and my futon should be delivered. Two and a half days until my company orientation in Osaka. One week before I start teaching. Seven thousand miles between me and anyone whose name I know. No plane ticket home.

I lie back down and fold my hands beneath my head. In the last twenty-four hours, I have severed myself from the realities of my life. I close my eyes and let exhaustion wash over me, drowning out the gnawing ache in my stomach. For the first time in my life, I am completely alone and utterly adrift.

The Merging of My Passions

The first time I traveled abroad, I was fifteen. I went to Monterrey, Mexico to do relief work in an orphanage for two weeks. The following year, I returned to Mexico, and when I was seventeen, I spent a month in Honduras. These early experiences with travel were central to shaping how I think about the world.



Any English teacher can tell you that we teach a great deal more than grammar and literature. We teach kids how to think about life, the universe, and everything. To some degree, that's true of all teachers -- I'm looking at you, Social Studies Department -- but in English class, this is at the core of what we do. What is literature, after all, if not a centuries-long conversation about the human condition? We let our kids in on what hundreds of voices from innumerable backgrounds have said, and if we're good, we encourage them to make their own contribution.



Because the time I spend traveling has such a powerful impact on me, I tend to tell my students stories -- sometimes comical, sometimes profound -- about the places I've been, the people I've known, the weird things I've done or seen or eaten. I consider it part of my job to pass along to them what I know of the bigness and richness of the world. Perhaps the most important part of my job.

This June, for the first time, I was able to do that in a very tangible way by taking a group of my students on a ten-day trip to Japan.



Not only did they get to experience first-hand a great cross-section of Japanese culture -- like a karaoke parlour and dinner in an izakaya and yes, even spotting a dreaded mukade -- they also got to see places I'd shown them photos of and meet some of the people who star in my best stories.

What's more, at quite a young age, they've already been to the other side of the world, seen a culture very unlike their own, and gotten a taste of what kind of adventures the world might hold for them if they're willing to go out in pursuit of them. I can't think of a teaching experience more rewarding than that.