Saturday 2/9/08 LEGO sculpture!!!!

On Saturday 2/9/08 I went to a lego exhibit put on by Piece of Peace. It was a room full of lego sculptures made to resemble world heritage sites. It was on the floor of a department store in Shibuya. It was pretty awesome to see these kinds of lego sculptures.

Cool Chinese building.

Pretty detailed and amazing sculpture made of legos....

The Easter Island dudes. :-D

The Taj Mahal!
A building from Nara, the biggest wooden building in the world.

A building I didn't know about from Kathmandu Valley. 

A sculpture of the globe with people surrounding it.

The Statue of Liberty!

A pyramid of Giza and the sphinx!

Roskilde Cathedral!
Freaking sweet building in China!

Westminster Castle!

Mt. St. Michael and the island!

Rome!
Buddhist monuments! I'll bet they're more amazing in person.

This is a whole shot of the Acropolis.

And a partial shot.

I think this is director Spielburg and a pirate captain!

This building was outside of the department store that had the lego exhibit. It has Japanese on the bottom, hebrew under the cross, and the cross. I'm so confused by this building..... 

Friday 2.8.08 Yokohama ChinaTown

I'm sorry that I haven't been updating as much as I want to! I'll still get to it, just a little bit later than I intended.

Thursday 2/7.08 was the Chinese New Year! We were hoping to go to Chinatown Thursday to see some of the celebrations, but we couldn't make it until Friday. By the time we made it to Yokohama everything was closing down, we had just enough time to get dinner, souvenier shop and go home. I'm not terribly disappointed because I'll be going to Yokohama for the full day on Saturday the 23rd to experience it a little bit more fully.

Yokohama has the largest Chinatown in Japan and it is very close to Tokyo. In fact it's connected by a commuter train and only took an hour and a half to get to from the dorms (it takes an hour just to get to school).

A photo of the map of Yokohama's Chinatown, it was pretty big!

A cool dragon dude outside a shop in Yokohama. I ended buying a panda ketai(cellphone) strap and some panda earmuffs.

Chinatown has lots of cool shrines and things :) I can't read Chinese or Japanese, so I have no idea what they were called.

Pretty pretty buildings.

Very very ornate.

A detail shot of the eves of the building in the photo above. Isn't it pretty amazing?

There were these gates over the streets of all of Chinatown at each beginning and end of the streets.

There was another ornate and cool building. And there was probably more than two in the whole of Yokohama.

Up close and sans gates. It was pretty impressive.

Friday, 1/31/08 Tsukiji fish market

Friday I got up really early, 4 a.m., to get on the first train to go to the Tsukiji fish market in central Tokyo. It's a famous place. It's where there is a tuna auction and retailers sell all kinds of fish. It's closed on Sundays and some holidays though. It's a pretty crowded and dangerous place. There are so many vendors, buyers, and fish carts driving around.

I saw this on the tracks inside the the subway station outside of Tsukijishijo station.

As soon as you get in the fish market itself you can see all these frozen tuna that were just auctioned off at that morning's tuna auction. Most of the merchants cut the tuna on site and then selling them to restaurants.

The fish still on the cart ready to be wheeled out of the auction area. That blurry thing is a cart going very fast through a larger aisle. 

At the market you can buy anything that is living or dead from the ocean. Well maybe not anything, but things that are edible.

Mostly, though there are fish and squid for sale.

And shellfish. I think these are abalone. 

This is when I started to think that this place was an alien world with really cool stuff. The ground was cobblestoned and slick, and the things for sale were unfamiliar and I couldn't understand the language. It was pretty amazing.

The aisles were incredibly skinny. I think you could fit one and a half people side by side in one aisle.

These little guys were still alive and wiggling. There were several tanks of fish with live fish inside ready to be sold and slaughtered for fresh meat.

I guess the eels are popular because they're mostly sold out.

I came across this as I was trying to navigate the market. I decided to turn around and try another path.

A merchant selling fresh fish to a buyer early in the morning.

Most of the fish are bought whole and cut into smaller pieces for resale right on premises by individual merchants. 

The exceptionally large fish are most often tuna.

That's half of a tuna body right there.

Frozen tuna are initially cut by band saw before being cut smaller.

I've never seen an industrial tool being used to cut meat before. But that's probably because I've never been to a meat market, a butcher, or a slaughterhouse before this trip to the fish market.

They probably go through a ton of ice at the market.

Kent! I don't know what they're selling, probably some food for the merchants, but I didn't stop. I took a picture because Kent is a town near where I live, my grandparents used to live there and my uncle still does.

I was surprised that there weren't many birds in the market. Though I guess I shouldn't have been because the market had a roof over it.

This made me stop and take a second look. It seemed to be uniquely innovative to me to have a display cooler in the place of a flatbed on a pickup truck or van.

Right outside the fish market there were many narrow streets of small restaurants. The restaurants were mostly ramen or sushi. I stopped to eat at Sushi Bun (pronounced "boon"), which was pretty expensive, but it was deliciously wonderful.

I didn't know before coming to Japan that wasabi, the spicy green horseradish paste served with sushi, is actually something you should eat. If you eat large quantities of sushi without wasabi you run the risk of getting parasites, because though the fish is clean and fresh, it is still raw, and might have some bugs in it.

This was a sign for a restaurant next to Sushi Bun. This is a fairly common attitude here, and it is legal and tolerated. It makes me feel uncomfortable and displaced generally, but I suppose it is the citizen's choice on how he or she treats foreigners. Where I live there are two venues that don't like foreigners, or gaijin (the slightly derogatory Japanese term for foreigners), and I've gotten the feeling that I'm unwelcome more than once.

It really bothered me before, but as I get to know Japanese people a little bit better I understand that it's not a prevalent attitude. Most of the time we're either tolerated or actually liked. Though, having the experience of being a minority isn't something a white person usually haves during their lifetime, I have a feeling that this will turn out to be a valuable semester to me throughout my future.

Ghibli Museum -Mitaka and Harajuku (Saturday 1/26/08 and Sunday 1/27/08)

Saturday the 26th was a really big day. I was up for Sumo and then I went to the studio Ghibli museum on the edge of Tokyo in Mitaka city for the afternoon. The Ghibli museum features exhibits about Studio Ghibli films, such as Spirited Away, Nausicaa Valley of the Wind, Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service, and more. I've seen many of the movies, they're all Japanese anime, but they're usually also done in English, a few have even been released in American theaters. The movies usually focus on pollution or human corruption and have a strong female character. I like them very much.

I took this picture on Friday, technically, but I didn't want to make a separate post about it. Subaru isn't particularly common, but there are some unique vans here.
See? Can't get these in America without a bunch of trouble. I don't know how to ask what model a car is, so I don't know what they're called.

These dogs outside of the Subaru dealership made me think of home because my old girl, Chloe, is a German Short-haired Pointer, just like these dogs. She's almost 13 years old now, and I've had her since she was a pup, I miss her.

We're not allowed to take pictures inside the museum, so I took a picture of the outside. 
We could, however take pictures on the roof. This is a sculpture of a robot from the movie Castle in the Sky.

:)

And me, in front of a block from the Castle in the Sky.

The next day, Sunday 1/27/08, I went to Harajuku again to go window shopping and hopefully find a pair of cute boots on sale since it's nearly the end of the winter, and I ran across this statue. I don't know what it is or why it's there, because I can't read Japanese.

I also went to Shibuya and there was a van parked outside of the train station. This van is a common sight in Tokyo, I'm told, it's members of the ultra-nationalist/ultra-right wing political party shouting at passer-bys. I learned about their existence in class, and I was exited to see them. I don't think they liked me taking pictures, but as far as I can tell, they didn't ask me to stop, so I didn't.
A close-up. They're not very popular among general public opinion, but they're generally ignored and law enforcement turns a blind eye to their excessive loudness and blocking of the flow of traffic.

Bathrooms are fancy. I took these photos from inside the sumo stadium, but the toilet had so many buttons! The most important and oft used one is the flushing sound one, apparently Japanese women are self conscious about others hearing them pee, so they would flush the toilets repeatedly, so to save on water most places have installed "flush sound" makers in each stall.

I love this sink. On the left, automatic soap dispenser. In the middle, automatic water faucet, on the right, automatic air dryer.