27 May 2009

We had Arch 480/420 lecture with Don this morning from 10am-noon, then the rest of the day was our’s. Almost everyone was completely exhausted from the past couple days, so no one wanted to go out. It was warm and humid outside, but it was a little bit less intense than usual. Since I’m planning to go to Norio’s parent’s house in Tochigi this weekend, I wanted to visit the two museums that Don has plans to visit on Sunday. I went by myself since everyone else was too tired. I hopped on the subway at Yoyogi-koen Station and got off at the National Art Center Tokyo stop. The façade and main interior space of the National Art Center Tokyo is really neat since it consists of a huge glass undulating façade with upward opening cones on the interior. It was nice being able to take my time and photograph at my own pace. The strange thing I realized about the museum was that, due to its large size, you had to pay for each gallery separately since they all had different exhibits in them. Don said the program would pay for the admission, but I wasn’t sure how many. I found one exhibit that I was interested in seeing, and I paid 1,000 yen to get in. It was the Hitoshi Nomura exhibit on the changes in time, perception, and field. I really enjoyed the exhibit, and I’m glad I was by myself since museums are meant to be experience at your own pace.
After the National Art Center Tokyo, I made the short walk to Tokyo Midtown where the Suntory Art Museum was located. When I got up to the museum, I found out it was closed until May 30th since they were in the process of changing the exhibits. It didn’t really look like something I was interested in anyways, but maybe I’ll go back at a later date. By then I was pretty tired, so I caught the subway back to the NOMYC and took a nap. For dinner, Derrick wanted to try a new burger joint that just opened called De Mode Burger. Dan and John had tried it earlier and said the burgers were decently sized. Blake came with us too, so that made three of us. I ordered the standard burger and added cheese for 790 yen. When the burger finally came out, it was huge! It also came with some big potato wedge fries, and I was completely stuffed by the end of the meal. Since it was new, they also encouraged us to write on the walls, so I wrote “05.27.09 Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo KENCHIKU”, and we all signed our names below it. [Kenchiku means architecture in Japanese.] It was really cool.
We went back and basically worked on our project until very early in the morning. Tomorrow we have to present to the class, so everyone was trying a little bit harder than usual. I’ll just be glad when we’re all done with the project, and I can hopefully get a little more sleep every night.