Well, it has been confirmed once again that if anyone deserves the title of ‘the great procrastinator’ i would at least be a contender. i went to kyoto for a quick day trip on december 13th – two weeks ago already!! i’ve filled these two weeks with editing photographs and promising myself that i would actually figure out the names of all the temples that i went to AND put links to information and stuff in the forthcoming post…. hehehehehhh… um. that’s just not going to happen. so, if i remember the name of the temple it’ll be in the comments for the photo (or title). i figured i’d better hurry up and slap the pics on the blog or they’d just rot away on my hard drive. i took over 200 photos and narrowed them down to these:

Well, i went to tokyo again…. there was an exhibit at the Ueno Royal Museum of salvador dali’s art – the largest exhibition in japan by a single foreign artist this year. i figured i’d better go since it happened to be so close. here’s a link to the museum’s pages on dali: dali2006. since i have two days off at a time i needed to find something else interesting to do in tokyo so i decided to go to disneyland!! hey, why not – i’m here, i might as well go. :-) so i took the overnight bus tuesday night (the 21st) that left from nagoya at 10:30pm and i arrived in tokyo at about 6am. not exactly the smoothest ride, but at half the price of the shinkansen it can’t be beat. i got to disneyland at about 7am and there was already a line to get in!! japanese people are crazy about disney (and other things too). i waited about 30mins. to buy my ticket and then waited another 20 or so to get in. people actually ran at top speed to get to the attractions in the back. i took a nice easy walk to the nearest restaurant to eat breakfast and drink some coffee. then i wandered around the park for a bit and was just blown away by the number of people. i went on 5 rides – one i only had to wait two minutes, two were about 20 minutes, one was about and hour and 15 minutes and the last one was about an hour and a half!! that really sucked… and biggest suck of all – space mountain was closed!!! yargh!!!!!!!!

So after my glorious time spent at Disneyland, i decided i needed a little bit of a break from screaming children, rampant capitalism and all things plastic. so i went two stops north of ueno on the JR Yamanote line to a little town called Nippori. They have quite a large cemetery and some of the town is still laid out like a traditional japanese town with narrow streets and really old looking houses. the cemetery is home to some really old graves as well as an awful lot of very vocal crows. which are also huge. and scary. and cool. all at the same time.

After my little trip to the cemetery i walked back down to ueno. then hopped on the train to go to asakusa (where i had been on my last trip too). i had booked a cheap hotel there – a capsule hotel!! yeah!!! here’s their website: capsule hotel. i walked around a bit in the evening and took pictures and had mushroom spaghetti for dinner. and beer too. called it an early night though since the bus wasn’t particularly restful the night before.

I got up pretty early the next day (thursday the 23rd) and headed back to ueno to go to the museum. and guess what – there was a line to get in. i waited about 20 minutes to buy my ticket and then another 30 to get in the front doors. it was four or five people deep in front of every painting (welcome to sardine town) so i took my time and wiggled my way to the front. and then proceeded to take mini-steps to the side until i finished one wall. it was a really excellent show though. i spent about 2 hours there. and also bought the catalogue for the show – you can look at it next time i see you. ;-)

I continued from there just down the way to check out the Tokyo National Museum. Their site. Ueno park has a bunch of museums as well as a pretty famous zoo (there are some pandas there). And I know you’ll be schocked, but there was a line to get into this museum too…. tokyo nat’l museum is actually four buildings, and only one of them had a line, so i guess i lucked out that time. it was really nice to see so many people interested in art, but i must confess that i prefer the empty museums in the states.

Whew! I took a lot of pictures… after ueno i went to ginza to a small art gallery and then proceeded to shinjuku where my bus was leaving from. ate some dinner and killed some time in a bookstore. read an english manga – ‘death note’. it was pretty good! then i ambled out to the bus stop and found my lovely bus.

My roommate Kerry and I have been trying to find new and interesting ways to occupy ourselves. And of course try to meet some new people too… We’re trying to go into Nagoya more often – especially on Sundays after work. Two Sundays ago (on the 12th) we were trying to decide where to wander off to and had picked out a Brazilian restaurant named Urbana from a tourist map that we had. We walked there and discovered that they were closed for a private party (wedding!). Feeling a bit lost as to what to do but determined to still have a good night, we wandered further down the street and seemed to have happened upon a not so fantastic neighborhood (!). We weren’t sure that they existed, but there was grafitti everywhere (and not the artsy kind), shady characters, and we saw two ambulances fly past within the space of an hour. Woohoo!!! We were about to turn around and try our luck in the other direction when I saw a sign for “Tacos” down the street. We both took off almost running to get to taco heaven. Actually, it was called ‘Los Tacos’, but whatever. We were thrilled to see it. We each had a soft shell taco (me chicken, her beef), split a quesadilla and an order of nachos. Plus a margarita and a beer each. FANTASTIC!!!! They closed early though so we had to continue along on our adventure….

So we continued along, heading back in the direction of Sakae and saw the ‘Barden Barden Beer Hall’. How could we possibly resist something that sounded so appetizing and classy??? We took the elevator up to the 6th floor and Kerry nearly got her ankle caught in the elevator. So much for being technologically advanced. We had a few beers from Belgium – ‘Satan’s Red’ and also some tasty cheese fondue!

After that extremely fattening stop we continued onto another bar (still back towards the subway exit) called Queen’s Head. This is a ‘foreign bar’ that some students had told me about before. There was only one other person there besides us and the bartender. He said there was a game on TV so no one was going out… Likely story. Anyways. We played darts (I lost every game) and had a nice time. Felt like we were in our basement. Took our shoes off; very comfortable. And of course, we hung around a bit too long and had to run to catch the last train back home shortly before midnight…..

Well, it’s definitely started to cool off here. The highs are just below 70 (or sometimes just to 60!!) and the lows are in the 50s and sometimes dip into the 40s too…. Yuck. It’s still awfully pretty though!! Lisa and I went for a little walk around the lake in Komenoki (one train stop to our east) last week on the 9th (Thursday). We took a ton of pictures of all sorts of pretty stuff…. :-)

And if you feel like playing around on google earth or earth google or whatever it’s called, here’s a link to my neighborhood with my apartment right in the middle!! GoogleMap The apartment building is a black rectangle. First, find the intersection of two roads left and below center. The block that is NorthEast of that intersection is my block. On that block, there is a parking lot in the northwest corner. My apartment is directly right (east) of the parking lot. And you can zoom in and out and go all over the place and see neato stuff!!! If you scroll south and find the train station & tracks then you can scroll east along the tracks, find Komenoki (and the lake).

Finally some more pictures and fun stuff!! A few weeks ago I took part in the Foreign Artists Exhibition in Nagoya. There is a ‘Nagoya International Center’ downtown that (surprisingly) tries to help out the foreign community in Nagoya and also sponsors various events. Their website: NagoyaInternationalCenter and then the Foreign Artist Exhibition page too. This was the 21st year that they had the exhibition. It ran from Tuesday October 31st to Sunday November 5th. I had one panel of drawings on display (19 drawings). (!) There wasn’t really too much point to my participation – other than to say that ‘I did it!’ So, I did it!

On the last sunday (the 5th) there was an after party for the artists and a guest or two. I went with my roommate Kerry. We took down my drawings and hit the free wine bar (yeah!!). Most of the artists who were there seemed really serious and just a bit pretentious. Kerry and I didn’t exactly blend. But it was good wine at least. After spending about 45 minutes there we decided to get out of there. We were going to go to the yaki niku place we had gone to before (from the previous post) but walked there and discovered they’re closed on Sundays!! So we just kept walking and happened to come upon a good looking place that said ‘English Menu Are Available’. It was like a sign from god!!! We found out after the fact that the restaurant is called Hana No Mai, which means flower’s dance (if I remember correctly). It was super tasty – some of the best steak I’ve had yet. We had a bunch of beer (surprise), steak, crab legs, crab cakes, french fries, edamame, and I had strawberry ice cream for dessert – with cornflakes on the side (??). Pictures below…..

And I somehow failed to mention that on the walk in between the closed yaki niku place and the Hana No Mai, we stumbled upon a winter wonderland of christmas lights and santa clauses. everywhere. it was like a sparkly plastic disease had washed over the streets of nagoya…. strange…….

Despite the delay, I thought I should still put these pics up. Some coworkers and I went to a tasty-delicious restaurant in Nagoya in the beginning of October. I have no idea what the name of the restaurant is (my Japanese reading skills still aren’t exactly up to par) but it’s a ‘yaki niku’ style restaurant (pronounce, yah-key nee-koo). And what that actually means is that there’s a big smorgasbord of raw food on ice in front of you, you pick out what you want and they grill it up for you there and then. Our chef was a lovely guy named Tomi. There were two big u-shaped ‘bars’ plus a bunch of booths off to the sides. We actually sat at one of the bars. Ayako, Kerry, Rob, and I spent a couple of hours there drinking beer, eating chicken, mushrooms, scallops, onions, asparagus, and I can’t even remember what else.

I’m not entirely positive how the idea came around, but we had all made comments about how Tomi was such a nice & friendly guy. Kerry had been a few weeks before and I think Tomi made a comment about how Kerry was so nice too. One thing led to another and before you knew it someone had handed me a marker and I gave Kerry & Tomi matching heart ‘tattoos’. We also added little engagement rings a bit later… :-P Ayako and a waiter also got matching flowers on the backs of their hands. Needless to say, Japanese beer is good stuff.