Week 10 Prompt: Favorite Place
FAVORITE PLACE — You’ve already spent a few months abroad. This week, take a picture of one place you’ll miss most—a park, a bookshop, a cafe—after you come home. And explain what makes you feel “at home” there.
Sabrina Farmer
Pictured is the landscape of the area known as the Cederberg where I did some biodiversity surveying. I enjoyed being surrounded by mountains again after being in the dry and flat savanna for so long. My friends and I would point at mountains in the distance and then hike up them to see what was on the other side. The views were breathtaking. Each night offered a different spectacular sunset. I would love to go back to the Cederberg and get permission to backpack through it. I could have spent the entire four months there exploring!
Ben Kelsey
This is a picture of the Kamogawa river, between the Shijo shopping area and the historic Gion district in Kyoto. It’s a popular place to hang out when the weather’s nice, and it has been especially busy recently with the cherry blossom season. To me, this place represents a broader part of my experience in Japan, and one that I will definitely miss when I return to the U.S.: the feeling that there’s something exciting and new to be seen or done at any moment, that there might be something just around the corner waiting to be experienced. This is a feeling that I have had elsewhere, too, but the aspect that is unique to Japan is that it’s still with me after 3 months. I still feel as though every restaurant I go to is an exciting new opportunity to try something new, or to have an even better version of something I’ve already had. Of course, there are always more temples and shrines to visit, more museums to explore, and more touristy areas to take advantage of in Kyoto, but for me there’s a real sense here that something interesting could be found in even the most unsuspecting places. Just today, I was walking through a little residential area on my way to lunch, and I turned a corner thinking that I could make a left soon after. It turned out that I was wrong, and I had to walk a good ways down the road before I was able to return to my path, but I’m glad I did, because the road had schools on either side, and was lined with the last of this season’s cherry blossoms that swayed in the slight breeze and dusted with fallen pink petals. It was a cool enough experience that it was worth going out of my way to see it. That’s the kind of thing that feels as though it’s everywhere in Kyoto. The Kamogama river represents this feeling to me because I only recently found out about it, after almost three months in Kyoto, and it just goes to show that there’s always something else to be seen or done. Whether it’s a view, a shop, or a weird beverage, there just seems to be no end to Japan’s ability to serve up novelty.
