Episode 11: Time for Tea

    Our Friday started off as usual, with Radio Taiso before breakfast, followed by morning classes. The students learned a variety of things from casual negation for verbs to more complex kanji. We then headed over to the upstairs floor of the dining hall for a tea ceremony led by Rie Sensei. She first taught us ikebana, the art of arranging flowers. After Rie Sensei finished her lesson, we gathered in a perfectly recreated tea room filled with tatami mats, ikebana, and a wall scroll. We enjoyed matcha tea straight from Kyoto before going downstairs for lunch. We ended out the day by carving out our designs for our woodblock prints on the blocks we would use. The task proved to be more challenging than we had initially anticipated, but we were able to get the hang of it by the end.