Golden Week!

Wee! Golden Week!

The longest stretch of holiday in Japan has just commenced. Golden Week, this year, starts today and runs until May 8 (weekends inclusive), giving us 10 days off work. Kuri and I booked a trip to Takayama and Shirakawa next week. These two cities are pretty close to each other (think Vancouver to Langley) and are usually visited in one go.

This trip was a good deal, but not as great a deal as it could have been if we did a true Japanese style tour (or as I have dubbed them, "hampster tours"). By this, I mean the kind of tour you see in the West where several dozen people go around in a bus, get off every once in a while, line up like a firing squad to take some pictures, and go on their way. These, as you should expect from something that requires no effort on behalf of the tour operator, are cheap. I'm pretty sure the example here is in Shirakawa. These people likely bussed 2 hours from Takayama and will bus back 2 hours only to spend 70 minutes there. That was the deal we saw today.

We almost gave this serious consideration.

Okay, who here would recognise the name "Amano Yoshitaka"? Only me? Okay... he's an artist, known mostly for his contributions to the earlier Final Fantasy games as lead artist and character designer. He sort of was to the Final Fantasy series as Conan O'Brien was to The Simpsons: everything he was involved in was fresh, innovative, beautiful; after he left the series jumped the shark (at least in terms of character design). Anyway, he's going to be present at an art show featuring his work. I'm debating whether or not to go. While I want to pay homage to the man himself, I'm not particularly interested in strolling around a gallery with just his artwork. In context, Amano's art is great, but it is a bit weird and I can't say I enjoy all of it. Anyway, if anyone out there is interested in this sort of thing, check the show out at http://www.artvivant.net/artists/amano.