ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

One of the things that I was looking forward to on my trip, was seeing what my mother and my friend Kendall would find interesting. I never would have guessed, but Kendall got very attached to tanuki! I've never seen a tanuki in real life, and for a very long time, I actually thought that they didn't exist. Japan has a lot of mythical creatures and monsters, and I thought that a tanuki was one of them!

Kendall took photos of tanuki whenever she saw one, and pointed them out to me in photos and advertisements. I hadn't realized that tanuki are used a lot! After several days in Kyoto, Kendall made it her mission to find a statue that she could take home. Her very own tanuki.

We had good luck at Fushimi Inari, where a gotcha machine had small tanuki toys inside.



And a little while later, we found a shop that had official tanuki statues of many size! We were a little bit worried about trying to pack something like that in her luggage, but she told me that it traveled to America with her in one piece!