Carmene Tan ♔: November 2014

With the huge scarecrow

Spending Time with Host Family

Nara (奈良) is actually some kind of village place, therefore, you can see a lot of farm crops, rice crops and more. The people here are mostly Buddhist, they did brought us to temple to pray.

We woke up at 7am, which is actually 6am in Malaysia, so early :( Our 'mother' already prepared our breakfast and it's was all nicely placed on the table.

tidy and clean

breakfast for one person it was so nice! super nice breakfast ! ♥

I really love to eat their japanese rice, it's stickier than Malaysia's. Miso soup EVERYDAY lol serious, they will prepared miso soup in every meal in Japan. Basically, it's same as malaysia's miso soup, not much different I can say.

Next, there's no forks and spoons for you, they use chopsticks for every meal but it's a different story when you're at a restaurant. And also, at my host family's house, I realize that they don't drink mineral water, they drink tea instead of mineral water, my 'grandmother' at that house use tea to have her medicines.

So, for my breakfast, there's bacon, eggs, some marinated cucumbers and a sweetened walnut. There's something special about the eggs, it's actually a fried egg with some boiled eggs inside, do you get what I mean? A fried egg with our nasi lemak's eggs inside, its quite unique and it tastes good! ♥

After our breakfast, time to pack our luggage.

A photo before leaving.

Our 'mother' already went to work, she owns a restaurant, so our 'father' brought us to some places around the village to have a look.

Beautiful scenery.

It's very cold outside the house, I think it's around 15 degree, you couldn't feel any cold when you're inside the house, you feel very warm inside but when you step out the house ... My hands were freezing oh my goodness , I didn't brought any gloves.

He brought us to a farm and have a walk. Basically, the highlight of the walk is there're a lot of creative and different scarecrows at the farm, around 40+ I can say, the scarecrows that presented are all from the winners from a scarecrow making competition.

made with bottle caps (can you see tropicana?)

It was cold but the sun still shinning bright.

paddy

crow

Bunnies !

Lavenders ♥

Daisies ♥

猪八戒

so pretty :)

The host gave us some paddy

After walking the farm, he brought us to a temple nearby to have a look.

Trees are turning into orange-red ♥

Went back to the restaurant to have our lunch,at that time, it's just around 11am and all of us were still full.

So the crews are here, still...

was helping to put the cushions down

The director was asking us questions

we wanted to help in the kitchen cause we used a lot of time slacking around in the restaurant and we felt guilty lol. Asked them with some simple japanese but they're sweet and kind enough to say being in the kitchen might be dangerous to us, omg so good ♥♥

Can't deny the guy who was holding the camera is hot.

My expression looking at him lol wtf hahahah

Our lunch (so big portion my god)

What's in our lunch?

From the top first row, the left one is some kind of salted vegetables. The rice was so nice my god except those sticky texture, the rice have some kind of salty taste it was so nice ! ♥ (i miss it now) and then right next to it, it was a cup of cold udon.

From the second row, the left one is... I don't really know what is it but it feels and tastes like tofu, can you see the green colour paste on it? It was actually wasabi. I first thought it was chawanmushi lol. The middle one was tempura. Then, the right one was some sweet potatoes.

From the third row, the left one is our dessert, it's actually ginger pudding, quite nice and the ginger's doesn't smell strong too! The middle one, I seriously can't say what it was, it taste like ... I can't describe it so skipped it. The right one was a sweetened walnut.

We were not hungry yet but not finishing foods is like being rude to them but at last, we still managed to finish it all. Our father finish the whole meal around 5 minutes and he was sitting there waiting for us to finish our meal, we took around 20 minutes to finish and he was still sitting there and waited us.

We need to say gochisosama deshita (go-chee-so-sama de-shi-ta). It literally means “It was a feast.” need to use this even if you’re still hungry :P we need to say that after finishing our meal, then only we can leave our seat.

What to say before having a meal? itadakimasu (ee-ta-dah-key-mas). Loosely translated it means “I will receive.” Japanese appreciate these manners and it's a must for them to do it before and after every meals.

A photo with the crew before we leave

with Sakamoto-shang, hope he and his family are doing well ! :)

when we're leaving ;')

They kept waving to us until we can't see them, they're so polite and we're touch! They still waving to us although we're quite far from them, when their size is like an ant but they are still waving !

Manyo Museum

The beautiful wall.

School visit: Takatori High School, Nara

School exchange program

Didn't really took photos with the students over there cause I'm shy lol haha just some simple photo of our activities over there.

We were all separated and went to our club activities over there.
There are 3 types of activities for us to choose,
flower arranging, calligraphy and one is something like taekwondo ( for boys only)

Flower arranging class

My masterpiece ! lol wtf

For my own opinion, Japanese boys are not that tall, it's really hard to find a person who is half a head taller than me, fyi, I'm 168 cm tall. At Malaysia, just in my class, many of the boys are like half a head taller than me but here, it's not. I can only see two or three boys who are slightly taller than me, but not half a head taller just a quater of head.