Richard Dawkins vs Anglican Bishop Harries

This debate was on science and religion, and was mediated by Jeremy Paxman. The following clips are approximately one hour.

Part One

Ohisashiburi — It’s been a while!

I think it’s time to show my blog a little more love. I spent an entire summer in Japan and only made two updates—that’s a bit sad! In an effort to redeem myself and to share some of my experiences I’m going to slowly update the blog with some photos from my semester abroad. I hope you guys enjoy it! I’ll start with a few from Kyoto.

Kyoto Station 京都駅

This is a picture I took when we first arrived at the station in Kyoto. It was a long trip, but not too bad since we took the shinkansen. I absolutely loved the architecture and had to get a few shots of the place. I was still a bit drained from the long train ride, so I didn’t get as many as I would’ve liked.

Out of all of the stations I’ve been to it was one of the busiest and full of tourists. One family from the UK that was leaving decided to dump all their tour books off on us as a “gift”….I think those books are still sitting somewhere in Kyoto til this day!

Sorry for the large file sizes. I don’t have any photo editing software on this computer. Check back soon and I’ll share some more!

Same-sex Marriage

I recently read a petition online that one of my closest childhood friends signed that infuriated me. Let’s get something straight right off the bat: Same-sex marriages doesn’t harm you, so why unnecessarily harm gay people? Stop the religious bigotry and open your eyes for once!

I’m in full support of freedom of religion, but not when that freedom imposes itself harmfully on the lives of others. Just because YOUR church and YOUR religious beliefs are against same-sex marriage doesn’t mean that everyone else’s is! Marriage didn’t begin with Christianity so stop trying to confine the rights that everyone has to suit YOUR religious doctrine.

I know the bible says that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, but guess what? Not everyone believes in the bible. Just because you do doesn’t mean that the rest of the society has to live by your rules.

It’s amazing how Christian fundamentalists are in full support of freedom of religion when it comes to teaching creationism in schools, but suddenly are against it when it comes to same-sex marriages, abortions, or anything else that doesn’t agree with them. Do you not see the hypocrisy? Are you really that incapable of thinking rationally?

Cramming Time

It’s amazing how many Japanese holidays there are during the summer. It seems that each week we have a day off, and this week just happened to be Friday. I didn’t go out partying, however, but instead stayed in my room and made a sincere effort to study.

I’m a little bit mad and disappointed with my Japanese class back in the states. Our class wasn’t taught nearly as much as we should have in terms of verb forms and kanji, and I’m split on trying to figure out why.

One explanation could simply be the book that we’re using called なかま meaning Nakama, which is setup horribly. During the first semester of Japanese you should learn around 50 kanji…our class learned 0. Yep. None. During the second semester you’re supposed to learn an additional 80. I think we may have learned about 20.

Kanji is introduced fairly late in なかま and doesn’t show up until somewhere around the 8th chapter. So the problem I’m having now is that I’m trying to take Japanese 201 here in Japan, but I don’t have knowledge of the verb forms and kanji needed.

The second explanation I can think of is that our sensei is purposefully going easy on us. We only covered chapters 6-9 this spring, which really isn’t anything when you think about it. Is it possible that she thinks we can’t handle it?

It’s frustrating me to go from being one of the best in my class back home, to being one of the worst here. I’m mad at not being prepared properly for the level I’m supposed to be at. So here I am trying to cram the entire げんき- Genki 1 book over the weekend to catch up with the rest of Japanese 201. Anyway, wish me luck!

Japanese Mosh Pit!

Yesterday was an amazing day! A couple of us went to the Asakusa temple during a festival, and there were thousands of people there. It was kind of hard to stop and look at everything, because there were so many people and they pushed you along. There were colorful shops everywhere, and more food than you could imagine.

Yes I actually ate one of those! Well…kinda…I got too grossed out to eat the head!
After taking a look around the temple we came out and somehow ended with a front row view of the shrines as they passing through. The energy level of the crowd while they were passing through was intense. People were shoving, yelling, screaming, cheering and at first I didn’t know what to think. I saw a whole section of people watching from the side get shoved down! I was scared at first, but quickly glad I came. It was amazing to say the least!