Yay, it's my birthday! Thank everyone for calling, writing an email, sending an e-card and/or anything else :) I've had a pretty good day so far, but this review on Mon is overshadowing everything a bit. We're going to be out of Tokyo all day tomorrow at Nikko. We have to leave the hotel at 7am and won't be back until 6pm or so. I probably won't be able to post anything again until Mon after our review. We'll see. I'm sure I'll have lots of fun pictures though.

And yes, the cereal was wonderful this morning. Never has Speial K tasted so good as from a Japanese tea cup ;)

Oranges and Arakusa

In the days since my last post, two miracles have happened: while out on our excursion with the program, we found a market vendor selling fresh produce. He had fruit! Our group practically bought him out of oranges which were about $1 a piece (still the best price we've been able to find). It was wonderful though. Then, today we found a grocery store and grocery stores have milk and . . . cereal! I seriously can't wait for breakfast tomorrow. Just so you can picture it, I'll be eating out of a tea cup that is provided in our room. I haven't quite solved the spoon dilema yet, but I will, oh, I will.

In an attempt to appease the comments on my last post and the emails I received, I guess I'll try to explain some of the pictures.
The first is of me at the Asakusa Buddhist Temple and Market. It just so happened that last Sat when our program went was the one day out of the year that they have a massive festival. Trust me, as Americans we don't really understand what massive means - the shear numbers of people that can cram into a space over here is amazing. The picture doesn't depict it as well, but I might try to load a video of the procession that we caught.
The second picture is of the baseball game we went to on our day off (Sun.). It was between the Swallows and Hawks. So quick differences between Am baseball and Jap baseball: the stadium is divided in half between home and away fans, both sides have bands and specific chants, the noise never ceases. It was more like a South American soccer match or a college football game than baseball.
The next is of me in front of the main gate at the Meiji Jinsu Shinto Shrine. Each of those major pieces that form the gate are from 1300 year old cypress trees from Taiwan. The diameter of the two posts is 1.2 meters and the total span of the top lintel is 15 meters. The Shrine itself was spectacular. I ended up going back on Sun to take more pictures and managed to catch the tail end of a Shinto wedding ceremony.
The following picture is another shrine/temple that we went to after the National Museum. We've been to so many that I can't remember the name of this one right now. This picture illustrates best why everything in Japan has a roof though. The majority of the precipitation around here is mist or very light rain (until monsoon season which begins June 1st, yay). To protect all of the wood from rotting because it would be so moist, their are roofs even on the walls. The more modern ones are copper, but traditionally they would have been thatch.
The next two pictures show me drinking from a natural spring. I wish the picture could show just how clear this water was. It tasted good too. It is located in the Meiji Jinsu gardens.
The final picture is of a bridge that Santiago Calatrava designed here in Tokyo. The shot was taken while on a river ferry that took us from the harbor all the way up to Asakusa under about 15 bridges.

New pictures: This one is of me in the pallatine of a shogun from the Edo period - roughly 17-18th c. Surprisingly, there was still some room left over when I got in, but the shogun was probably about a foot shorter than I am. I can't imagine it was a very comfortable way to travel either - four guys on posts with you up in the air.

Meet Teka and Akita, two junior high school students that came up to me in the Edo-Tokyo Museum while I was working on a sketch. We had a little bit of a conversation, but were limited by their english and my total lack of japanese. That is an issue that really frustrates me. I wish I had had some kind of crash course in language and culture before getting here. That was so valuable in Paris.

Through my travels, I've noticed that the density of cemetaries is often directly proportional to the density of the community it serves. Tokyo is no different. These kinds of cemetaries are everywhere, though cleverly hidden. No one is actually buried here. They are all cremated and then placed into the bottom of the foundation of the monument/headstone. The wooden stakes are prayers of the family. Ten or twenty people might be interred in a single plot.

Yesterday we went to the most amazing museum. It was the studio/house of a famous Japanese artist, Arakusa Fomio. He was an incredible sculptor, but his house was what interested me. I could seriously go on for pages about how fascinated I am by the proportions, materials, and compositions that he created in each room. This is what I came here for. This is what I think of when I think of Japanese architecture that I want to study. It's going to take me a while to absorb everything from the visit, but I'm definitely going back.

Finally. . .

It has been too long. You would think, in one of the most technologically adanced countries in the world where their current technology is our future technology, that it would have been an easy task to find an internet cafe so I could use my computer to access this thing. They're more scarce over here than fruit. None of you can truly understand that last statement, but trust me - I haven't had any fruit since being here. The closest I get is the glass of oj with my "western" breakfast at the hotel in the morning - which also happens to include a salad. I don't know who informed them that we eat salads in the morning, but I'm about ready to have a few words with that person. Oh for some cereal and milk (two other things that don't exist here). I think those happen to be the only draw backs to this entire endeavor though . . . and they are seriously minor in the big picture.
This place seriously rocks and I'm having a blast! It's hard to communicate, but we're able to get by on grunting, pointing, and the occasional person that knows some english. It's easy to get around because all the signs are in english, chinese, and japanese, but you know everyone's reading the characters. Whenever I spot another "westerner," we have a moment of quite recognition of each other that is comforting because we both know what we're going through and then they're gone in the next couple of steps. It's cool being somewhere so alien though. I'm worn out at the end of the day from just studying people and all of the intricacies that separate this place from New York or Chicago and make it just Tokyo.

Studio has been good to. It reminds me so much of being in Paris - I really miss Paris at times. Our challenge is to design a single family home on one of ten sites. Each of the sites are in a different ku (burough, ward) and have really different characteristics. They go from mid-rise buildings in an upscale shopping district to low-rise residential that feels more like a shanty-town than middle-class (the insides can be really plush despite the corrugated metal exteriors though). Right now, we're in a documentation phase. We have a mid-review on all of that tomorrow and will have our final next Monday.

I can't sit here and catch up with everything we've done everyday over the past week of being here, but here are some pics of the highlights. Two things - we were delayed six hours leaving from Dallas and we didn't see the sun until Fri thanks to a typhoon off of China. I'll try to write more of a reflective piece on the cultural, social, and spiritual things I'm noticing/learning/absorbing soon. Enjoy.