Jo's Meditation Room

When we moved into our new house and assembled Jo's loft bed, we realized it was really too tall for her room. She could just barely sit up in it. "No problem!" we said. We'll just cut a foot or so off the bottom and it'll be perfect! That was over a year ago. Jo LOVES hanging out in her bed, but she's been getting taller and things were getting ridiculous.

We finally got to work a few weeks ago. First we had to clear everything away from the bed area - no small task. Then Alan did some fancy sideways cutting with the circular saw while kneeling on the floor. I very helpfully held up each corner of the bed while he cut.

We propped the cut legs on a pair of cinder blocks to keep everything level(-ish) while we worked. You didn't think we were going to disassemble the bed to do this, did you? Silly!

Amazingly, it all went really smoothly. And now that the bed was at the right height we could FINALLY curtain off the lower part into a "meditation room" - as promised many moons ago. By the end of the next day we had rigged up some curtains (those are shiny iridescent stars on an indigo background), some tiny purple lights threaded through the bed slats, and a couple of lamps for reading and crafting. The rest of the decor is all Jo.

She's strung beaded necklaces, added a little nightstand and a very special lamp that belonged to my grandmother, added a million stuffed animals, quilts, afghans and pillows - and moved right in. It reminds me so very much of her first meditation room. . .

Want to see that sign close up?

Awesome!

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Japan Trip - Around Shinjuku, Part One

Welcome to Shinjuku, home of the busiest train station in the world, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and more shops and restaurants than one person could ever hope to visit in one lifetime.

My trip began, again, on the Seibu line. I transfered again at Musashi Sakai, but this time passed Kichijoji to the extra five or six stops to Shinjuku. There are heaters under the seats, which was nice on this cold, cold spring day.

The Shinjuku train station is legendary, I've discovered, for its complexity. It's very easy to get lost in it--mostly because there are so many lines that come in to it, and thus so many levels. There are also about six main entrances, some of which take you out underground and deposit you a quarter of a mile away from the other side. If you leave through the wrong exit, you've got a long walk ahead of you. I knew I wanted to start on the west side of town, so I just went for the first exit that said "west" and I did okay. My plan was to go straight to the 45th floor observatory in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. It wasn't open yet, so I walked farther on to a small park behind it, called Shinjuku Central Park.

The sakura (cherry trees) have just begun to bloom! It's been a long winter, and it's still cold here, so the cherry blossoms have been delayed a bit--which is good for me. The people of Tokyo are desperate for spring though.

I wasn't the only person out taking photographs--there were two other men out roaming the park with cameras this early in the morning.

This guy was getting his blue tarps laid out in preparation for a day of sitting under the sakura and eating and drinking. One of the teachers at ASIJ tells me the sakura watchers can get pretty blitzed, and that he saw a few ambulances called in to cart people away. That said, the revelry is supposed to be a pretty sedate affair for all the drinking. I think it was pretty darn cold to sit around in a park all day (about 40 degrees F), but to each his own! In a week or so, the sakura will be in full bloom and parks like this will be packed with blue tarps and crowded with folks ready to spend the day under the blossoms. As I blog this, the TV evening news is focusing on where the sakura are blossoming, and charting the blooming times by decade. You'd think after centuries of being obsessed by the sakura blossoms, they'd be over it by now--but no way.

With a little more time to kill, I walked around in Shinjuku's business district, where the architecture of some of the skyscrapers gets really interesting. The rocketship-like building is apparently the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower. What's going to pop out of that cocoon, I wonder? This?

I wonder...

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building is described as Orwellian in more than one travel guide I have. I think it looks a bit more like an Alliance cruiser from Firefly:

Whatever it reminds you of, it's imposing.

I'm playing around with the panorama setting on my new camera. I rather like the sweeping effect I got with it here. Click on the image to see it larger. This is the main plaza at the base of the government building. I visited on a Sunday morning, so it wasn't full of people. I imagine it must be on weekdays.

Near the plaza was a statue honoring the little bastards who keep me busy with my vacuum cleaner each spring: Japanese Lady Beetles. Some moron thought it'd be a great idea to import them to the US to control some other pest, and now these buggers are the pests. Don't mess with nature, people!

There was a line when I came back for the observatory. It's free to go up though, and that's about the only thing you're going to get for free in Shinjuku, so I wasn't going to miss it.

Forty five floors up there's a great observatory with a 360 degree view. There's also a cafe in the middle, and a bit of exhibition space for local art.

The views are what everyone's there for though. This is Tokyo, from Shinjuku Ward, about 9:45 in the morning on a cold spring day.

You're supposed to be able to see Mt. Fuji on a clear day, but we weren't treated to that sight this morning.

The big green spot is Shinjuku Gyoen, a public park where hanami (cherry blossom viewing) is very popular. The park was originally only for royalty. It was completely obliterated in 1945 at the end of World War II, and in 1949 the park was rebuilt and opened to the public. The park has approximately 1,500 cherry trees.

The stadium in the middle of this image is the National Olympic Stadium, built for the 1964 Summer Olympics. It's now the home of the Japanese national football (soccer) team.

Here's that park I visited before ascending to the observatory. That fellow has his blue tarps spread out under the cherry trees.

You can go up either of the two towers. Each has its own 45th floor observatory. Here are the folks who chose the other tower, peering out over the city.

And here's me, a bit backlit, and a bit too far away, but just happy to be there.

And one more panorama shot, this one catching a few sightseers along with a bit of the view. Again, click to see the image larger.

Next, I go back down and explore Shinjuku's infamous east side shopping district!

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Japan Trip - Around Kichijoji

It's 7:00 a.m. in the morning here, and I don't have to be at my first day of school at ASIJ until 9 a.m. Time to blog! Saturday I went to Kichijoji--the town I cannot pronounce the same way twice (and never correctly).

Kichijoji is four stops away, but I have to take the Seibu line to Musashi Sakai and then transfer to the JR East Chuo line to Kichijoji station. The Seibu line trains are nice, and not very crowded for Japan trains. (It's a small line.) Seibu itself is a big company though, and the sponsors of the Seibu Lions baseball team. I think that's why I see a lot of ads for them in this town, even though they play in Saitama, about 40 km west of Tokyo.

Kichijoji is dominated by an enormous covered pedestrian shopping arcade called Sunroad, with huge department stores as anchors. It's shop after shop of restaurants, clothing stores, electronic stores, and specialty shops. I spent a while in the hanko store, looking at all the various ways you can have your hanko, your signature in kanji, made into a stamp.

Here's "Hair Agreable," which sounds like an amenable place to have you hair cut.

Video game arcades are still very much alive and well in Japan. Here's an elaborate, multi-station game where you place collectible cards on your console. The cards must have chips or identifiers in them, because they "ping" with little glows around them, and represent different players on the screen. This game was a European soccer game, where you put the player cards on the console and they appeared on the screen. You position the cards to position your players, to help them perform better on the screen. There were sword and sorcerer variations on this game as well, and I found a shop in Shinjuku the next day that sold only this kind of cards.

And here's a uniquely Japanese variation on Guitar Hero: Taiko Drumming Hero!

The oddest thing about the Sunroad shopping arcade is that there's a Buddhist temple smack dab in the middle of it, like they just built the place around it. It too is open for business, as it were, so I stepped inside.

It proved to be quite an oasis.

I saw a woman enter from the shopping arcade, toss a coin in this box, pray for a moment, then pull that rope, which rang a loud bell.

In the same space was a small Buddhist cemetery--a really serene spot. All of the grave markers had wooden slats behind them, with writing on them.

The proximity of the temple to the shopping arcade made for some interesting examples of "shakkei," the Japanese word for borrowed scenery in landscaping.

This one had a sort of poetic connection to it, I thought. :-)

Outside the arcade, Kichijoji still had lots of interesting things to offer, and I wandered around for the rest of the day, taking in the sights and trying not to get run over by bicycles.

 

Another great piece of manhole art here--this one is a warning, I think, not to park here, as there is a fire hose connection underneath. There were larger versions of this around town too.

I later learned that there's a great place to look for used kimono in Kichijoji, so I'll have to come back with Wendi and Jo. Tomorrow, pics of my adventures in Shinjuku, the place where Lost in Translation was filmed, and which was supposedly part of the inspiration for the world in Blade Runner.

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Rainy Day Fun for Geeks - Science and Gaming

Jo and I have been busy, busy, busy all week long - so today was for sleeping in, relaxing, and having some fun together. We started out by breaking open our new Princess and Dragon expansion set for Carcassonne. Thanks Alan! We've been eager to give it a try and it didn't disappoint - adding a different strategic twist to an already terrific game.

Then we got to play Mad Scientist. I saw this online last week and knew immediately that Jo would love it. Growing colored crystals inside eggshells - what's not to like?

We made super-saturated solutions of table salt, kosher salt, ice melt, granulated sugar, powdered sugar, baking soda, and kitty litter crystals. Yes - kitty litter crystals. We'll see.

Jo tried out all the different color recipes on the back of the food coloring box. Of course, like a good scientist, she took excellent notes.

She documented what color she made each solution - even noting how many drops of each color she used. She also looked at the original salts under a magnifying glass and predicted what shapes the new crystals would take - drawing a picture of each prediction. We're already seeing some very cool results from the baking soda solution.

Some of it seeped through a hairline crack in the egg and crystals have started forming on the outside of the shell. Ooooh - magic! Now Jo's watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and building a temple complete with booby traps and snakes. In a few minutes I plan to join her - with some nice quiet hand work in my lap. [sigh of contentment] A very nice day indeed.

Hope you all are having a lovely weekend!

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