...And then the Internet died...
Anyway! Pictures, yes?
This is my ikebana (flower arrangement) project. ...It looked a whole lot better in the academic building, but oh, well... It was really cool, cause we had these ceramic pots and you put a little spiked thingy in there and impaled the flower stalks on them...And then you had to put the big green background things so they made a triangle no matter what angle you looked at them from, and you had to think about the center flower and the complimenting flowers. As the week went by, my flowers bloomed, and the look of my arrangement shifted naturally. It was really cool...
Tea ceremony- really interesting, but murder on your legs if you're not used to sitting seiza (like our hostess is in this picture, with your legs tucked under you). This is the tatami room inside the academic building. The floor is very delicate, so we can't even wear slippers in here, and we use it only for special things like the tea ceremony.
...The flash made this stuff look radioactive or something... Anyway, this is called matcha. It's a fine powder made from ground-up green tea leaves. You mix this up with hot water to make the tea for the ceremony. (You can also go to Starbucks and get this mixed up with ice, milk, and sugar to get an awesome blended Frappucino...one of the things I will truly miss about Japan...sigh. But I digress.)
Behold the instruments of the tea ceremony! Only the hostess has to worry about these things, and we just have the tea served to us. But, the little tiny ladle thing is to spoon out the matcha (you can see a little bit of it still on the tip), the thing that looks like a whisk is to stir it (you really have to stir fast, like you were beating an egg), and the cloth is to clean the cup.
Oh, and this is just our uber-cool rock garden. Just wanted to share that.
Next time: the buttload of pictures from Hikone-jo (Hikone Castle).
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