Aaron's learning

I apologize for the gap between this post and the last. I've learned a valuable lesson in life though: if you don't pay the internet bill, then your internet gets turned off. But I have since paid my internet bill and restored my connection. Hurrah!
Anyway, i have no real updates to give on my current life, other then that I am in the midst of making my last minute decision to recontract with my program or not. Though I think it unfairly early to have to decide about a 1 year contract in a foreign country 6 months before the previous contract finishes, that's how it goes. My thoughts on this are too vague to bother putting here, so without further ado, back to some pictures:

This is atop a futurey looking building in Osaka where you can see the shiny urban sprawl to the horizon in every direction. According to my guidebook the night view of Osaka was one of the main references for the future nightmarish cityscape in Blade Runner. The scary/exciting part was taking the glass elevator up the 40 or 50 some stories to get to the top. Shana really liked that part.
This is a lampost shaped as a robot holding a light. To add the sillyness of that, it's in "Amerika-mura" (America village) in Osaka. Our brief walk throught it made it look like a normal trendy youth-ish spot in urban Japan, and I'm not exactly sure what was so "American" about it.
Well... after a few days in Osaka, on to Kyoto we went. These aren't actually "geisha," and I don't actually remember what they are called, but they are some kind of traditional pretty-Japanese-ladies. This is in Gion, Eastern Kyoto.
Here's the whole gang again at a park a bit East of Gion. Wow, look at all those girls...
Shrine gate a little walk into that park. I could give a list of the shrines and temples we did see, but that area is loaded with many of them, and I'm not sure giving their names would clarify much for anyone. But they are all in East Kyoto, south of Ginkakuji if you want to look the area up.
This is some kind of pasty dessert from a really cute sweets shop in Kyoto. I don't know what it's called, but you pour the little cake things and powder into a cup, and add very hot water (the owner made sure that i understood VERY hot water, not just hot). Amber had Aussie friends over and we had enough packets one for each of us so we gave them a shot. I'll withhold the general concensus in case the girls want to try it or give them out as a nice present...
This is kinkakuji, golden temple. Not a terribly mysterious name. A pretty sight though. One of the more famous images in Japan. Some of my coworkers and students couldn't identify Miyajima (red shrine on the water) or some of the other places in kyoto and around from pictures that I showed them, but everyone knows kinkakuji. We're all simple creatures though, and we tend like shiny things. And not to generalize, but maybe the Japanese love shiny things even more than some others. Just a humble observation.

I'm not done yet, but blogger is operating very slowly at the moment, and it's passed my bed time. I'll try to finish up in one more post this week. Then I can go back to telling tales of going to work 5 days a week and hanging around on the weekends. How exciting!