Maria is back from Tokyo. The angels sing! The boys are ecstatic to see her again, and I consider myself one of the boys ;-). But tomorrow I’m off on a solo trip to Newport for the weekend, while Maria stays home with the boys. My step-brother is getting married! So I’ll be back next week, with pictures, if I remember my camera…
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I don’t know the first thing about architecture, so all I can offer is a layman’s perspective: the Tokyo International Forum is a seriously cool building. In this blog I have praised many of the wonders of Tokyo, but one area where the city generally comes up short is its buildings: the vast majority were built quickly after World War II to fulfill basic functional needs (many have been replaced since then, and the city has grown as well, but the newer buildings are often just as unremarkable). Most of the architecture is drab and dull, so snazzy structures like the Forum building really stand out. The Forum serves as an exhibition hall and a conference center. It was completed in 1996, and it’s located on the north side of the JR Yurakucho station.
[mpiphoto=343,right,scale,250]Here are some observations made by Ivor Richards - someone who does know something about architecture - concerning the Forum and its architect Rafael Vinoly:
Vinoly has likened the Glass Hall to nineteenth-century public spaces; indeed like arcades: both the Milan Galleria and the Crystal Palace are recalled in this immense, awesome space with its monumental staircases and shimmering bridges and ramps, that are almost Piranesian in scale.
The Plaza itself recalls the scale of other European models like the Piazza Navona in Rome, and the whole ensemble has been compared to the symbolic presence of the Sydney Opera House, or to the grandeur of the Parisian Eiffel Tower.
The Forum’s Glass Hall and Canopy are particularly noteworthy:
…The theater lobbies overlook the plaza which serves as civic space and visually filters into the Glass Hall, a large glass enclosure with a dramatic 750-foot-long truss that hovers above. At night, light reflects off the surface of the ribs and transforms the structure into a monolithic floating light source, illuminating the Glass Hall and profiling it in the skyline…The 35 x 16-foot Yurakucho Canopy, the world’s largest free-standing glass structure, shelters a staircase leading to an underground rail station and forms a key entrance to the complex. The Glass Hall, one of the most daring structures ever built in Japan, consists of two intersecting glass and steel ellipses, which enclose a vast central lobby and unite the elements of the complex. This structure is composed of seven stories above ground and three below. The 197-foot-high laminated glass curtain wall was designed to be transparent, visually connecting the theaters and plaza to the conference center.
[tags]Japan, Tokyo, architecture[/tags]
I don’t know how single parents do it, especially with little kids. Over the past two weeks Maniac Baby and his older brother, Mr. “6 Going on 16″, have run me ragged. And I say that while doing the single parent gig under really good circumstances: I’m working part-time, they have good day care, I have a reliable car, a nice place to live, medical insurance, I don’t have to pinch pennies for their food, and the whole situation is temporary. I’m lucky to have all that going for me, so, like I said, I don’t know how most single parents do it - take away even one of those conditions and it would get a lot harder.
The part that’s particularly challenging for me is preparing 3 meals a day, as I haven’t done much cooking since Maria and I got married (almost 8 years ago!). I did better providing meals for the boys in Tokyo. There it was easy to get healthy meals from the grocery stores - they carry a variety of noddle, fish, rice, and egg dishes made fresh daily. Here in Philly, the meals that are easy to get are mostly some combination of salt, sugar, fat, and grease, so instead of feeding them that stuff, I’m cooking as best I can.
Maria is back on Friday - 4 days. Not that I’m counting ;-). The boys and I talk with her on Skype every night. We have webcams so we can see each other. It’s especially nice for Eidan, since he’s not old enough to understand the situation. This way he still gets to see Mommy - in blurry two-dimensional form, anyway. Maria says she has some great pictures from her trips to the Philippines and Vietnam - maybe I can persuade her to write another blog post when she gets back.
Here are a couple of totally gratuitous pictures of the boys:
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Eidan in the playground at Kai’s kindergarten (Takanawa Yochien)
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Kai outside the Tokyo International Forum
Update: I fixed the video. I successfully transcoded it to mp4 (using the VLC Player) and uploaded it to Picasa. I recommend clicking the arrow in the lower right hand corner of the Picasa player and selecting “original size” so it won’t be too blurry. Unfortunately however, Picasa is rendering the audio and the video slightly out of sync, which is really annoying.
Click the image to see a great song that was performed on the Japanese kids show Nihongo de Asobo (Let’s Have Fun with Japanese). I have to admit I actually looked forward to this show coming on when the boys would watch TV in the morning while Kai got ready for school. I couldn’t understand most of it, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying its great mix of Japanese kids’ songs, poetry, and theater. It actually provides a nice introduction to some aspects of Japanese culture (but this song is just for fun - as far as I can tell, anyway). Here’s a nice summary of the show:
The goal of the program is to get children to rediscover and enjoy the rich world of Japanese. Interesting words and phrases that people would want to read out loud are taken from things like Japanese classical performing arts, poems, novels, and historical phrases and introduced to kids through drama, cartoon, and song.
Here are a couple signs that definitely weren’t proofread by a native English speaker. I actually saw the “Hair Saloon” mistake a few times in various neighborhoods around Tokyo.
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As promised, I’m going to keep blogging about Japan for a while, even though I’m back in the US now. I have a big backlog of things to write about. However, while Maria is still in Japan and I’m at home taking care of the boys and working, my posts for the next few weeks will probably be longer on pictures and shorter on words, as I don’t have a lot of time to write.
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The many slides of Robot Park. That’s Maria in the blue jacket, with Eidan next to her.
[mpiphoto=333,left,scale,200]Sakura Zaka Koen is a tiny gem of a park, tucked away on a small street a short walk from the mind-bogglingly massive 27 acre, $4 billion Roppongi Hills shopping and entertainment complex (you can see the exact location on this map). It’s a ridiculously small park, but packed with slides. It’s nice that some space was made for it, given that the area is home to some of the most expensive real estate in Tokyo.
It’s also unusual for a Tokyo playground in that it was designed with safety in mind: most of the ground is covered with a giant rubberized mat, and all the slides are contoured plastic. The only thing remotely dangerous is the long roller slide (these kinds of slides are common in Tokyo but rare in the US - you need to be careful with little fingers and long hair).
The robot theme also gives it real charm. We visited for an hour or so with Maria’s friend Shiho and her son Kento. The boys loved it, as it provided a nice break from our strolling through Roppongi.
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[tags]Japan, Tokyo, Roppongi, playground, park, robots[/tags]
Well, that was awful.
I didn’t sleep on our flight back from Tokyo, and then I went almost 4 days with nothing more than a half dozen 30 minute - 90 minute naps.
It’s a 13 hour time difference between Tokyo and Philadelphia, so it’s a complete reversal of night and day. Eidan and Kai took the slow road to adjusting to the time change, and they each came at with different schedules. Eidan was sleeping the first half of the night, and then around 1 AM or so, he would decide he was done sleeping. It’s time to play, daddy! But Kai couldn’t fall asleep at all until about 2 AM. So at any given point I was up with at least one of them.
But I’m happy to report that for the past two nights they’ve both been going to bed on time and sleeping reasonably well until morning. So I’ve managed to make a dent in my sleep deficit and I’m mostly functional again. Tomorrow they’re both off to school (Kai’s school also provides daycare, and Eidan is old enough to go now) and I’m off to work. I’ll just be part-time until Maria’s back in a few weeks.
On several occasions this week I was laughing at myself - being sleep deprived is like being drunk, in that your reasoning abilities are totally shot, and trying to string together words coherently in a conversation requires a lot of concentration. You don’t slur your words like a drunk though - instead you tend to choose the wrong words, or just leave words out. When I took the boys grocery shopping, I kept saying “sumimasen” to people (Japanese for “excuse me”) as I navigated the aisles, and I kept telling Kai to stop leaning on the stroller, when I meant to say cart.
Another difference is that you don’t lose your motor skills when you’re sleep deprived, which is good, because in the middle of all this I bought a new car. We sold our cars before we left for Tokyo, so I had nothing here to drive. Maria and I had already settled on exactly what we wanted, so fortunately I didn’t have to think through any of that. It’s a Toyota Prius. While we were in Tokyo I was blissfully unaware of gas prices here, but seeing them at over $3 a gallon has reaffirmed our choice of the Prius (it’s rated at 60 miles/gallon). The Prius’ are selling like hotcakes right now, so there wasn’t much opportunity to haggle over the price, but that’s just as well, as I don’t think I was up for it anyway…
I also want to mention the first things I noticed coming back to the States. After being away so long, I was curious to see what would jump out at me. On arriving in Chicago, I was taken aback by all the fat people! One thing I’ll say for the Japanese is that they’re in a lot better shape than we are. And on arriving in Philadelphia, I was startled at how dirty everything was. Tokyo is an amazingly clean city, and it was easy to get used to that. Kai proved to be a better American than me though - the first thing he noticed was the American flag.
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