Rice and Ramen

A few weeks ago I got the best news: A museum was reopening in Tokyo. (OK, yes, I probably have gotten better news than that in my life, but this was still pretty good.) The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT)  had been closed for three years in order to renovate the building. And since I only moved to Tokyo just under two years ago, I had not yet gone! I promise, for me this was quite exhilarating. So this past Saturday I took myself all the way out to Kiba Park, where the museum is, on the other side of the city from my apartment. And after a full two hours in its current exhibit, "Weavers of Worlds: A Century of Flux in Japanese Modern/Contemporary Art," I just wandered around taking pictures of some of its better architectural features. Some architecture details: The museum was designed by Takahiko Yangisawa, who also worked on several other notable buildings, such as the MOA Museum in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture (1981); New National Theatre, Tokyo (1997); and To...

The best part about having friends and family visit me here in Japan is that I get to play tour guide and show off my city--in this case Tokyo--and my obviously extensive and amazing knowledge about it. Every so often, however, having friends and family visit means I get the opportunity to visit someplace I've never been before, in which case the trip means I get to show off how well I can use Google and read signs in train stations (both of which, I would argue, are valuable skills). My mom, who came out for a long weekend, and I decided to spend a few days in Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido. We found some fairly inexpensive flights, booked a hotel, and thought the matter done and dusted. But only a few days after making all our arrangements, Hokkaido was rocked by a  magnitude 6.7 earthquake  that left at least 30 people dead and the entire island without power or water for several days. But after carefully monitoring the situation, and checking-in with the local U...

Hi guys, long time no see. Haven't had much time to write, recently, but I have a slew of (hopefully) new material to show you guys.  Two weeks ago my family came to visit for my brother's spring break, and I had planned a (pretty epic, if I may say so myself) cross-Japan trip for them. Over the course of 10 days we were going to visit Hiroshima, Miyajima, Himeji, Kanazawa, and Tokyo. After the fam arrived, we took the bullet train all the way over to Hiroshima (a 5 hour affair) and then worked our way back east towards Tokyo. Our first stop, Hiroshima, dawned bright and warm. We started the morning at the  Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum , which is at one end of  Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park .  The museum is, in a word, heavy. It's one of those museums where you feel like you should read every single bit of text and look at every photo and bear witness, albeit 70 years later, to the utter horrors that the atomic bomb wrecked on this city.  As ...