On the road again...

I am going back to Cyprus tonight for three weeks. I guess my life in Tokyo has got into a rhythm of sorts and now, a change like this brings an almost subconscious fear that grips the excitement coming from visiting family. OK me will keep this short - I am typing on my phone and while it doeshave a full-ish keyboard it still is a bit of a pain to type. More soon assuming I make it to Cyprus in one piece :p

Tokyo National Art Center

 

Located in Roppongi, the National Art Center should definitely be on your places to visit if you ever happen to be in Tokyo. Not only the art center houses certainly interesting exhibits but the general design of the building and the gift shop themselves are more than worth walking for about 5 minutes from the nearest subway stop. There are signs to guide you once you are close enough but you may have to look for them. I recommend looking up in a map before going to Roppongi – once you know the general direction, getting there is simple.

The first thing you realize when you walk through the door, other than the ticket booth which you only need to stop by if you are going to wander into the exhibit, is the design of the building which looks extremely futuristic. It was designed by a very famous Japanese designer and in a single word, is very "curvy". This idea of "futuristic curves"  is followed throughout the building. The gift shop itself is pretty amazing and very different than the typical art museum gift shop which would be content with its offering of postcards based on famous artwork. Not this shop... There are a lot of small items that themselves could easily be called works of art - original ones mind you. The only slightly upsetting thing is that you cannot take pictures inside the gift shop so I don’t have anything to post on here but you should go check it out for yourself anyway :)

It’s rain and humidity for Tokyo…

While we may be still in the “rainy season”, a roughly four week long period that precedes summers in Tokyo, we also get the occasional sunny day. Yesterday was one of those days with the temperature reaching 36 degrees Celsius/93 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem with sunny days is that it gets extremely humid. I have survived through the humidity of Pittsburgh summers but this is something else.  It gets so humid that even when “sunny”, the sky is not blue as the clouds get lower and lower and paint the sky a gloomy gray.  Thankfully when it rains it gets better – well it gets very wet but at least less humid.

Today was a rainy day and when I say rainy I mean RAINY. It started to rain in the morning and it continued until at least 6-7pm. As people expect this kind of weather in this time of the year it became second nature to people to carry umbrellas, just in case. This is why there are “mini umbrellas” suitable for the smallest of purses widely available and quite cheap actually. I am going to have another week of this and then I will be away for a month – cooking in Cyprus. It will be even hotter than here for sure but at least it will not be humid there – for the most part…

You never know what you are going to run into…

… at a used clothing store. I snapped this at one of those stores close to the Kichijoji Station (吉祥寺駅). The tshirt is clearly a Pittsburgh Pirates (the baseball team) tshirt but it’s not just that. The design seems to be pretty old though I can’t really verify that right now. I think it is even possible that this tshirt was not made officially or that it was made simply because someone thought the Pirate Parrot was cute.

Seeing the Pittsburgh word made me miss the city though…

20 meter tall robot in Tokyo

The love of the Japanese people for robots is a pretty well known phenomenon and it is easy to see artifacts of this all around Tokyo but this latest happening pretty much takes the cake…

There is now a “life-size”, that is about 20 meter/66 feet tall, model of a “Gundam” robot in Odaiba. It looks like it is not completed yet with the workers still on site and in fact you can see one of those workers in this picture on the bottom right corner so you can get a better idea. At night they also turn on the lights on the robot and it can also move its head. All in all, pretty impressive I would say. I unfortunately did not get the chance to look at it at night or walk right up to it because of the construction but I am hoping I will get to do both before they move the robot – I heard it will not stay in that spot forever. That gets me thinking – where are they going to move it to afterwards?

The watermelon is yellow

I don’t know about you but I have never seen a yellow watermelon – well, until a few days ago that is. Apparently these guys are pretty common in Japan and actually the price is not any higher than their good, old, red counterparts. The taste is pretty similar too, if a little sweeter. I think the outside of these is also a shade of yellow as opposed to green which makes it look almost like an over side melon as opposed to a watermelon. I wonder if these are indigenous to Asia…

A box of cherries for $150 – You can get it in Japan!

Fruits (just like vegetables) are very popular in Japan and the Japanese public enjoy having choices in their fruits, in the same vein as pretty much any other consumer item out there (for example Sony PSP comes in 7 different colors here for that very reason). This means apart from the run of the mill fruits one can find at a supermarket, there are "higher quality” fruits available at specialist stores with prices easily topping $100 for a box.  Of course given this price point, it is easy to see how these particular fruits can be used as a present. One of these specialist stores is Nakano and I visited their location in Shinjuku close to the train station(They also have smaller stores throughout Tokyo though not all carry these fruits, with some focusing on desserts).

Cherries seem to be particularly popular, as a gift, with the Japanese. The boxes here each contain 40 “specially selected” cherries and they can cost anywhere between $100 and $150 depending on the type and quality of the fruits. Other fruits such as guavas and peaches are popular as well and are available in their own packages or in combination with other fruits. They also sell fruit jams and fruit juice made from these fruits as well and some of the combo sets include these. The same store also sells champagnes for making custom gift combinations with prices reaching $500 and up.

It is definitely an interesting place to visit and with the fruit juice bottles costing around $10 one can try them out for a reasonable price. Oh and don’t worry about the weight – they take care of shipping for you on heavier sets.