12 April 2013 · Comment
Japanese picture explosion!
So Brittany was great and I did manage to eat like three amazingly delicious crepes at every meal. I only regret that I have but one stomach to fill with crepes. Now I’m in Madrid which means I left Japan a week ago which means it’s time to get a move on with posting the rest of the pictures! So I put them all in here in a veritable pixplosion. Sorry if it makes takes forever to load them all but it’s my website and ah do wut ah wawnt. I’m gonna come back and caption them tomorrow because it is late and I took the night train last night so I’ve had the sleepy grumps all day today.
The Naoshima pumpkin! It’s a sculpture on a beach. I saw a picture of it on the internet and I was like, wherever that is, I wanna go there. And then I did. Which I’m sure is a totally normal and healthy way to make decisions.
Me pretending to hold the pumpkin whilst lookin like a dingus. You know, as ya do. Despite what this picture indicates, I do think I’m doing a better job with regards to not usually looking like a dingus on this hobo trip compared to the last one, during which, let me remind you against my better judgement, this was a totally normal outfit for me to wear:
SIGH YOUNG SARAH BETH. Just, no. That’s a t-shirt and a sarong that I am trying to pass off as normal clothes in a normal city full of well-dressed people. Not like, on a beach, in case it wasn’t obvious. But this time I am aiming for at most a 4 on the hobo/dingus scale, with a 10 being a full-on tin can hat and bindle and shoe with a hole in it that my big toe pokes out of. The headphones cord coming out of the chest pocket is at least +1 dingus but sometimes sacrifices must be made in the name of not getting my phone stolen a second time whilst traveling.
The yurt on the beach that I stayed in in Naoshima! I wish I’d eaten a yogurt in a yurt. While doing yoga that hurt. Maybe next time. Naoshima is neat because it used to be a small fishing island community but then some artists started setting up installations like giant beach punkins and then it became an artist colony! The best kind of colony!
Yurt door!
Now we’re in Tsumago! It’s an old-timey historically preserved village that’s very pretty. Even things like telephone lines have to be installed underground so as to not mar the historical preservations. But then they still have stores selling like, waving cat statues so there is that. Maybe they had waving cat statues back in the 1600s, too!
Some rooves.
Reproductions of how town notices used to get posted. Each one has its own little pointed roof! Adorable.
Umm, a wall. I guess. I don’t know.
An interior wall with some beams making some shapes on it! Ahhh, I don’t know what do you say about pictures like this. All of my pictures are starting to look the same to me, probably because I know about four rules of composition.
A door. Blah bloo blee blah.
Some water from the hike between Magome, the town where I was staying, and Tsumago. It was very pretty and there were a bunch of bells posted along the trail with signs saying you should ring them to scare bears away! Neat! Ok my laptop is almost dead so I’ll finish these bros up tomorrow.
Hey! I am back. In the last day my whole body and all of my face holes erupted in sickness, so I’m feelin a little woozy. But I am really trying to not be a crouton about these pictures so I will soldier on! So sorry if I make even less sense than usual, but that’s why.
This is a building in Atami! Lonely Planet and people on the internet kept saying that Atami is not a fun place to visit but for the last six years I was like “no lonely planet and people on the internet, you are wrong you just don’t know Atami like I do it is great and I love it and we are going to get married!” But then I went there and it turns out it’s kind of a sad place! Maybe it was partially sad because it was frickin freezing weather for visiting a beach town so it was creepily empty, but it was also kind of run down in an unloved way, not in like a fun wabi-sabi Berkeley way and overall it was just not like the fantasy land I’d built it up to be in my head from a super brief glance out of a moving train window years earlier. Again, who ever could have seen this coming! I feel like… there’s a lesson to take from this. But like, I was curious and I went and now I know! Am I rambling? It feels like I’m rambling. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken all that cough medicine before I started doing this. Ok whatever, next picture!
The train station in Atami! What really drew me to the city was its like, three-dimensionality since it’s built on the side of a big hill and it slopes down to the beach and big skyscrapers pop up every so often. It still looked very appealing every time I passed it on a train, and you can kind of get a sense of that from this picture and the next one. But it turns out that having an appealing layout from afar doesn’t necessarily translate into being a satisfying place to go to! I mean, I’m sure a lot of my dissatisfaction came from my own business about being lonely. Also I’d just finished “Oryx and Crake” a few days earlier, which is a really good story but it’s about the only person left in a post apocalyptic world and really not the right kind of book to read when you are traveling alone. Like last time I traveled alone, when I read “American Psycho” and then I couldn’t stop thinking about things like as if I were a serial killer! Rookie mistake!
A ladder and some city stuff. Maybe I like cities with lots of three-dimensionality like San Francisco and Berkeley because it feels like I’m playing real-life chutes and ladders. Oh man, I WISH they had giant slides in Berkeley. Ah, but they do! In San Francisco! The Seward Street Slides! Maybe I should move back to the Bay Area in a month and a half! Okay, done.
Some concrete blocks on the beach! Hey guess what, I didn’t know what these were for so I stopped being lazy and I went on google and I looked it up and they’re to prevent beach erosion! Knowledge! Also I looked up the other two things I didn’t know. The barrel things at the temple were used for storing sake! And the lantern things ARE lanterns! Yay! They are called toro. Awesome. I like how these blocks look like pixels. Or voxels if you want to get fancy about it.
More beach blocks!
A flower in Atami!
An olde fashioned door in Ito, the town where I stayed near Atami. They’re both on the Izu peninsula to the southwest of Tokyo and the peninsula is a really nice place! Maybe just take the train by Atami but don’t stop there so as to not ruin the illusion for yourself if you go there. Also maybe go sometime when the high temperatures aren’t in the 50s.
A burd! Also in Ito.
My room in Ito! I stayed at K’s House Ito Onsen and it was just real neat. They had little screens to separate our futons from each other’s.
And we had a little balcony with a sink overlooking the river! The next two pictures were taken from the balcony. Also pictures: the awesome kindle that David got me!! Ahhh that thing is just the best. Plus I still have my Redwood City library membership from last summer and they have a huge collection of kindle books to check out so I haven’t had to buy a single book yet on this trip! Living in the future! The only thing is now I have to be worried about this:
But it hasn’t been an issue yet because it keeps a charge super well. I’d highly recommend getting an awesome brother who can give you one!
Some cherry blossoms falling into the river!
Another waterfowl! So majestic.
AHHHHHH ZIMA!!!! I finally got to try one of these after seeing all the cheesy commercials for them in the 90s when I was too young to drink! Now I finally know what it was like to be an adult in the 90s!
Little did I know that someday I would be just like the snotty vegetarian lady in this treasure trove of 90s cliches! But seriously Zima is so delicious! Like if a Mike’s Hard Lemonade and a beer had a baby. But they don’t sell them in the US anymore! Maybe a store in Japantown imports them. I can only hope.
The pagoda at the Senso-ji temple in Tokyo! Neat.
And the gate!
More pagoda!
A pretty sunset outside the train station next to the Ghibli Museum! And a weird turtleous building.
The street next to the museum! You can’t take pictures inside the museum which is lame but it is so great!! Like being inside a Ghibli movie!
Some cherry blossoms next to the museum! Whoa I am almost done. Which is great because I just took another hit of cough medicine and it certainly did not help the not talking nonsense situation. What. I don’t know.
This is Chiba! The town between the airport and Tokyo where I spent my day of shame waiting for my makeup flight out of Japan. But it was nice! And I got some pretty good presents for people! And actually made it to my flight on the second try! So that’s not too shabby.
And those are the Japan pictures! I’m still in Madrid but I’m going to Granada tomorrow evening and I am excite! Whoa I need sleep. Okay later.
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