I swear I'm going to update this blog more often, even if it kills me.

It's been, what, a month since my last update, so it'd be kinda futile to try to talk about everything I did and everything that's happened since then. I will try to write about some of the stuff I've done at some point though, and post some pictures! Especially because Kyoto's really really gorgeous right now.

One thing I really love about Kyoto, and that's totally different from America, is how easy it is get around on bike. My commute to school is about 30 minutes each way, but it's a straight, easy ride and I ride along a major street. The city's amazingly bike-friendly because the main streets are incredibly wide, and they really help make the city layout easy to figure out. Also, unlike in America, so many people ride bikes, so bikers are given a lot more consideration on the road.

I learned how to bike for the first time the summer before the program, and I gotta say it's probably one of the best decisions I've ever made. It was tiring and scary at first, especially because bikers here go pretty fast and tend to try to squeeze through narrow spaces. I've had tons of close calls and a couple of minor crashes. But biking has literally saved me at least a couple hundred dollars at this point, because I can get to almost anywhere in the city without taking a bus or taxi. It's also made a huge difference in my social life, because I can go anywhere without having to worry about how to get there or about catching the last trains at night. Plus it's great exercise and a good way to see the city, even though I do get tired of it. I'm definitely going to miss biking when I go back to the states. I'm planning to get a bike, but it'll be almost purely for exercise purposes - St. Louis is definitely not bike-friendly, so I'll probably only be biking in the park or maybe to the grocery store.

Another thing that I love about my life here is how much more time I have. It's hard to believe that back in Wash U I complained about the 10 minute walk to the library. I had time to exercise maybe once or twice a week, if I was lucky. Here, at least one hour of my day is spent on bike commuting to and from school, I eat dinner with my host family at a leisurely pace, and I still somehow get around 7 hours of sleep almost every day. Living in Japan is definitely stressful in its own way (I'll get into that sometime...), but I'm really not looking forward to going back to the stresses of Wash U.