A new week has begun in Japan and we met another friend staying in Kyoto: her name is Ryoko. On Monday morning she waited for us at the train station with other young friends, dedicating the entire day to us and skipping university. The visit included in the morning two temples, namely the golden one and the silver one; the main difference we found between these lies in the fact that while the golden one leaves you stunned by the beauty of the temple itself, completely plated in gold.
As for the silver one, our attention was captured by the uniqueness of the garden, obviously cared for down to the smallest details: the maintenance work is never finished, there are a ton of gardeners who take care of keeping the lawn and everything else in perfect condition in an almost maniacal way (they swept the lawn almost as if it were the floor of their home and removed the fallen leaves one by one). In the afternoon we broadened our Japanese knowledge: Ryoko introduced us to some university classmates and with them we spent the entire afternoon around Kyoto. In classic Japanese style they insisted on taking us into an amusement park, a sort of arcade spread over several floors. One of these was completely dedicated to one of the most beloved contraptions of young Japanese people...
it's a kind of photo booth machine, only you can customize them in a thousand ways, with the most varied backgrounds and writings.
The following day, again under Ryoko's watchful eye, we made a "quick visit" to the local university... in fact they invited us to the Italian course for Japanese students. Actually it was a course also dedicated to Italian dialects, and we gave a lesson on the Treviso dialect. We were struck by the informality of the lesson, a decidedly relaxed and serene atmosphere, so much so that at the end of the lesson the teacher came to lunch with us. At the end of the academic lunch, caught by surprise while sipping a pseudo-Italian coffee, we heard Italian voices behind us. Well, to our surprise Simona popped up, a girl from Frosinone who is at the university of Kyoto to study Japanese for an entire year. Me cojoni, as Simona would say. We were pleased to make her acquaintance and to hear a bit of the Ciociaro dialect...
and she made us hear quite a lot of it since she didn't stop talking for a moment... what a pain... just kidding, really we were really pleased to meet her. In the afternoon yet another temple: Kiyomizu Temple. The uniqueness of this building consists in the fact that it was erected on stilts, but above all it represents the integration between two different religions, Buddhism and Shintoism. In the evening, for the pleasure of our readers, we abandoned the usual restaurants, because Masaki ('o professò) invited us to dinner at his parents' house. His mom prepared a classic: curry rice level three (in fact you can choose how spicy you want it, on a scale from one to thirty).
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