I woke up today feeling much better than I did yesterday. I think it was due to the three plates of orange, grapefruit, and watermelon slices I had last night.. and/or the walk from Nipponbashi to the JR circle (It's far..Queen station to Bay station +/- 2?). Wing left for work this morning and left me a key so I slept in until the agreed meeting time for lunch...which means I hastily ran out the door, turned off all the lights etc. and hoped that I would find the subway entrance so I wouldn't be late.
I went to where Wing works. It's called the Crystal Tower and it is apparently earthquake proof. It just looks like a giant mirror. We had lunch at this place that had an all you can eat bread bar. I forgot to take pictures, but the bread was yummy. I had spaghetti, soup, and salad and all the bread of different varieties that I could eat. It probably sounds like a lot but in reality there are only 6-7 different types of bread at a time and they are all little buns because the Japanese have small appetites.
Here's Osaka National Museum of Art. It's really tiny but it's better than none. I tried to get someone to help me take a picture of me but no one was around, and I waited, and still nobody showed up to help. I tried to do it myself but all I got was my face and the floor haha. There were three exhibits. One about these models who were to depict themselves in 50 years and wear a mask of an old lady and take a photo, and tell a story. As strange as it sounds, I really enjoyed the exhibit. I stopped to read each piece. (It's called Miwa Yanagi Po-po Nyangnyang!)* The other exhibit was a commemorative exhibition of the 150th anniversary of
Keio University, which is an Arts school I believe, so there were student works from now famous poets, architects, designers, etc. It was alright. Too bad everything was in Japanese and the bits of english that existed on the info cards had spelling errors. The grandmother one was in english and Japanese though. The last exhibit was a selection of paintings from the Louvre as a study of children as inspiration.
*"This series, which Yanagi realized by asking her models, chosen by public subscription, to imagine their "ideal appearance in 50 years' time," and then using special makeup and computer graphics to create the image of each person as an old woman that arose out of repeated interviews, might be seen as a collaboration between the artist and the model. The images envisioned by the models functioned also as Yanagi's ideal grandmothers, inspiring her to continue creating a variety of images of old women with the idea that the more grandmothers one has, the more possibilities one has in the future."
I walked next door to the Musuem of Science and Technology and to my joy and surprise, the entrance fee was free!! If it wasn't I wouldn't have gone in because I'm pretty sure science in Japanese isn't really worth paying for. However since it was free, I went and pushed all the buttons I could push and pulled anything I could pull on. Stood on things, tossed things, weighed things, you know, the regular science museum stuff.
However, there were a few things I did not understand...
This is an optical illusion, I know. But how does it work? No matter what angle I stand in front of this picture, the front will still be FACING ME. Apparently TV's can do this too. It's kind of like a hologram but it has 180 degrees.And this ball. It floats. I know, you are going to say its magnetic, BUT... there's more to it I think. When I place my hand between the ball and the coil, the ball drops (of course), but when I put the ball back to its original spot, it no longer floats. Instead, it sticks directly to the coil. (magnetically..) In order for me to make the ball float again, I have to take the ball and let it touch the left light and then the right light (the black tube things) and then when I raise it to the middle, it floats....so, can someone explain it to me?
The museum closed before I could finish, so all the kids scrambled to play and push as many buttons as possible while being hustled towards the exit.
1.rubics cube solving robot 2. kid trying to listen to himself
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