hey all,
I wish I could say that this weekend was relaxing but it wasn't. I had to come in for another teacher on Saturday and I had maybe 50 minutes of free time between 9:30AM and 5PM.
The next say was pretty fun, though. Michi and I went to the Da Vinci Museum in Hibiya Park in Tokyo, and though expensive, it was pretty interesting. One of the major attractions is that they have real models of many of his designs from his notebooks, and you can actually play with some of them.
They were doing some kind of "Secrets of the Mona Lisa" exhibition, which featured some highly detailed pictures and analyses of the famous painting. To be honest, I've seen the real thing in the Louvre, and I found it underwhelming at the time, and I still don't really understand people's fascination with it. In any event, the secrets all turned out to be things like "he changed his mind about the positioning of the fingers on the left hand" or "he never finished the fingers on the right hand" or "the paint used for mona lisa's eyelashes has not stood the test of time" (which is why she doesn't have any eyelashes).
Playing with his gear trains, his irregular cams, and ball bearings was a lot more interesting.
Today, we relaxed a bit, and headed over to the movie theater with the intention of seeing Norwegian Wood, a movie adaptation of a novel by Haruki Murakami (one of Japanese most famous living novelists). Unfortunately, we got there a bit late, and since I had to return to Yokohama and run some errands, we opted to see Unstoppable instead, since it had an earlier showtime. Not bad.
Cheers,
