Acting like a real student

I have to say that Friday was unusually eventful, and also ridiculously hot. I actually only have one class (Japanese) on Fridays, but one of the classes was going on a fieldtrip to the Toji Temple Market near to Kyoto station, so I decided to tag along. Well, it was not as easy to find as we had originally thought, but once we actually got there it was extremely large. The Toji Market happens on the 21st of every month, weather permitting, and is essentially a flea market with various vendors selling everything that you can think of, from tomato plants to old violins to kimono. Since it was my first time there and I still have plenty of time to shop around while here I restrained myself to a hairpin (which I haggled for! In Japanese!) and a bunch of huge grapes (since it was so stupid-hot). After that, though, we hurried back to campus to meet the other students to go to a welcoming party held by a Doshisha student group for us. Unfortunately, a full day walking around in full sun sweating like a pig had taken a bit of a toll on me, but I still managed to carry on a couple (simple) conversations in Japanese with the students at the party, and afterwards a bunch of us went out for Thai and then headed back to, you guessed it, Kyoto station for some karaoke. We had some difficulties navigating, but we did end up having a good time with the karaoke, and found it especially amusing that the company that produces the equipment appears to have created music videos for any song that doesn’t have one of its own. This meant some very random video clips to songs like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Hollaback Girl’ to name a couple. I managed to make it back in time for my curfew. My host mother was awake when I got back though, which made me wonder: when/does she sleep? She’s always up before me (my first week here I got up in the early hours and she was already awake and bustling about) and she’s always in bed after me (around midnight is my guess). This is only one of several paradoxes that I’ve noticed since being here:
-There appear to be no public trashcans, but there’s no litter either
-This is the land of vending machines. They are on every street corner and in front of every drug store, but it’s impolite to drink or eat while walking and I have yet to see a Japanese person doing either.
-On the subject of drugstores, every convenience store has a sampling of liquor from beer to whisky in levels of alcohol content, but if you want to by a bottle of aspirin you have to go to a (hard to find) special store for it.
When I first got here I started thinking about the vast amounts of money that people must spend yearly on Omiyage (gifts) and thought that it probably counts for a considerable portion of a family’s budget, but then I realized that the average household probably never has to buy tea snacks for any sort of event, since there’s a pretty constant stream of them from the various gifts that they’ve received.