Earlier this week my manager told me I would be going to Kanazawa on Sunday with one of my students. I was like, "uhm, okay. What is Kanazawa? And why am I going there?" I mean, thanks for giving me the option and all. Turns out, Kanazawa is a pretty large city close to Tsuruga and has a modern art museum called the "21st Century Museum" that is suppposed to be pretty cool. Modern art museum, I am completely down for that. Saturday night my student told me that he and several of the other higher level students (from now on the 7-up crew, since they are all above "level 7" english proficiency according to Geos standards, and therefore I can talk to them easily) were going to this museum and asked if I wanted to come along.
Of course! The one problem, 9am go time. Ouch. 9am rolls around and the 7-up crew is rarin to go. I am struggling to keep my eyes open in the bright sunlight and I can already tell today is going to be brutally hot. No matter, it is trip time!
Kanazawa is about a two hour drive from Tsuruga. Tomorrow is a holiday in Japan (Respect for the Aged Day, aka old people day) so everyone has off and wanted to go do something they wouldn't otherwise be able to on a normal two day weekend.
Kanazawa has a castle!
We walked by it on the way to the museum. It was huge! I guess it would be, it is a castle after all. The street the museum is on is named Moat street since it is where the castle's moat used to be. Or, the river around the castle as one of the students put it. I was just surprised that a street actually had a name. Very unusual.
The museum was really cool. Here is their website. It is sucky. You can't take pictures of most of the exhibits, but there is a neat optical illusion pool that is a favorite picture place.
Look down into the pool. There are people down there!
From inside the pool looking up.
Basically it was an underground room with a glass ceiling painted to look like a pool. And above ground there was about half a foot of water on top of the glass that really made it look like a pool. Very neat to look down and see people walking around.
After that was a dress made out of beetle shells which was neat looking. Then an optical illusion of a hole on a wall that I can't explain. You go into a dim room and look to the left and there is an angled wall with a hole in it. Or is it a hole? There is a black circle that might be a hole that is ten feet deep, or maybe two inches, or maybe is just painted on the wall. It is hard to explain, but it was really really cool to sit in the room and look at this black dot and try to get your eyes to tell you what you are seeing.
There were some video installations, which don't really excite me, especially because they were from a few years ago and the technology has gone past them at this point. The only video installation that I ever actually enjoyed was at the Andy Warhol museum and it was a video of someone sleeping. It was completely fascinating to stand there and wonder if something was going to happen. Maybe it was just me.
My favorite part of the museum was the Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade (warning, that link is a pdf file) exhibit that was a life sized version of this:
A play house/fairy thing. The best part was inside there was a ton more stuff. There were lots of childlike drawings and toys, but they were all "teen angsty." Which is what I think Yoshitomo Nara is known for. For instance there was a crayon drawing of a little girl with an angry face and written below the drawing was "I want to burn this city to the ground" and another crayon drawing had "Fuck you! I am old and can say what I want" written in a childlike scribble around it. Very neat juxtaposition, standing in a child's playhouse and looking at all the anger. I wonder if the Japanese got the same thing out of that experience since most of them probably didn't bother to read the English writing. Oh, and of course, my favorite part was there was a cd playing inside the playhouse and there was a 20 song playlist written on notebook paper laying on the floor of the playhouse. The music nerd in me loved that!
Then there was the main exhibit by Makoto Saito. He is apparently a renowned graphic designer and this exhibit was his paintings. He took frames from films and blew them up huge, like 5'x5' and then, best as I can tell, took a massive dose of psychoactive drugs and painted what he saw. Or rather, digitally re-imaged what he saw since this was all done with digital ink and paint.
These are from the brochure accompanying the exhibit, and the small size of these does no justice to how surreal the paintings were. I would equate him to a modern day Van Gogh, just the impressionist painting. It was cool to look at; I have no idea what any of the stuff "meant" but I would have bought a print to hang in my apartment had they been available. Unfortunately, they were not. I need some cool art for this apartment. I feel like I am living in a hotel.
Oh, and apparently if you make anything big enough it becomes art.
Giant fooseball.
There is also a tasting room at various times during the day when you can buy food to taste "emotions."
Hopefully if you blow up those pictures you can read the "flavors" offered. I really wanted to taste "impatience" but we weren't there at the right time and I didn't feel like waiting around.
Very cool museum. I would mos def. go back again when they change exhibits.
Then we went and ate at an Italian place called Budoonoki on the outskirts of Kanazawa. Budoo meaning grape, no meaning from, and ki meaning tree, the grape tree. It was a grape farm and the grape trees made a canopy over the dining room and also over the parking area. It was very pretty and apparently they do a bunch of weddings there throughout the year. We went there for Sunday brunch/lunch (since it was 2 pm when we got there I don't know what to call it). They had a soup and salad bar and you could order either a pizza or pasta for your meal, for about $17 bucks. I had cold pumpkin soup. It wasn't bad. I really want to try warm pumpkin soup, I bet that is fantastic. I had some salad with grape dressing (tasty), some fried vegetable that was just odd tasting, and a three cheese pizza. Now, one of these days I will learn that Japanese pizza is much different from American pizza. I thought I was getting a pizza with four types of cheese on it. And I did. I got pizza dough with four types of cheese on it. No sauce! Like eating cheesy bread. It wasn't bad, I would have just rather had pizza that had pizza sauce on it. Oh well, from now on I must remember to order a margarita pizza because that is the one with sauce, cheese, and basil. Red, white, green, the colors of the Italian flag. Simple and delicious.
One of the crew ordered pasta bolognese (spaghetti with meat sauce) and it came with a soft fried egg on top of it. Ahhhh! Why do they do that? Eggs on top of everything in Japan. The next Japanese phrase I am going to learn is "No egg on top." That will be infinitely more useful than "Hey baby, what's your number?" (Besides, I already know that.)
After lunch. Oh, and I had grape soft serve ice cream. It was so freaking good! Why don't they do flavor soft serve in America? Besides vanilla and chocolate? Hmm. Either way, that ice cream was fantastic!
And I saw my first white person while in Japan at Budoonoki! And she looked like a Russian prostitute. She was chainsmoking the whole time, was wearing a leopard print tank top and a short skirt with cowboy boots and had that stringy hair and awful skin that unhealthy chainsmokers get. Or that Russian hookers get (I am speculating here).
Anyway, after lunch we headed back toward Tsuruga. We passed by a town holding a festival and I took this picture of guys in pajamas preparing to run through the town holding a throne for their God. I think that is what that is. What is that thing called? A walking throne?
About halfway between Kanazawa (have I called it the same thing throughout this post?) and Tsuruga we stopped at a small town called Tojinbo. Apparently this town is known for suicides and is supposed to be haunted. It is located right by the ocean on cliffs and is somewhere people go to throw themselves into the sea or onto the rocks below the cliffs. The town has these tiny streets and is very hilly. We went during the day, but I could see how creepy it would be at night. But, when we went it was tourist city on those cliffs!
Yeah, I can see how people throw themselves off those cliffs.
Look at all those sicko tourists. Just waiting for somebody to jump.
I don't know if that is entirely true. It is a very pretty area and the cliffs are beautiful to see. I am sure people also jump off the tall rocks at Catoctin State Park, and the King and Queen's chairs in Bel Air. Pretty much any high place will probably attract jumpers. However, this place is especially renowned for suicides.
Flowers at the end of one of the rock outcroppings.
The suicide phonebooth. Located about 2o yards back from the cliffs. Phone that links to a suicide prevention hotline, you know, just in case.
The Japanese think of everything.
And that was my day. Pretty good way to spend a sunday. And now I am completely beat and am going to bed.
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