17th Chapter: Trip to Tenri, even more religions, and finally a meeting with a friend I've never seen before

Yesterday, I received such an overwhelming amount of information about Japan that I had to digest it overnight before I could start to share some of it.

In the morning, I traveled to Tenri, a place in southern Nara, to meet an old friend. However, I had never seen her before. About five years ago, we randomly met in some crafts group on Facebook, and when I found out she lives in Nara, is from Estonia, and is married to a Japanese man, we agreed that if I ever traveled to Japan again, we would meet up.

Since then, we have occasionally stayed loosely in touch, and yesterday was the big day. It's crazy how you form ideas about a person you only know from the internet! She turned out to be completely different from what I had imagined, twice as tall, lively, funny, and exceptionally warm-hearted.

Living as a perpetual foreigner in a very different country connects us and certainly gives us a completely different perspective on the country we live in. Our perspective is also somewhat limited because we both lived for a long time in a very specific small town from which we judged the entire country, but she has also partly lived in Osaka, and I now live in Helsinki, so over time, one's perspective does broaden significantly.

Nevertheless, she talks about life in a deeply religious area. The Tenrikyo