i went for a mission by myself yesterday. i woke up really early because the sun rises at(or at least it is light by) about 4am here! the one thing i don't feel like doing at all here is sitting around my apartment watching info-meat-mercials. so i was up about six and decided to head into ueno, a large park in central Tokyo. i had no idea it was going to be so awesome!
the first thing i saw was a ventriloquist ..... i am not usually into that kind of thing because it creeps me out quite a lot, but the girl who was setting up her performance in the park was so interesting looking that i stopped and watched. she had these massive crescent moon shaped eyes and wore an old school charlie Chaplin style hat. her doll was about 2/3 the size of a human, wore a similar hat to her and a grey suit, he had a brown face and really blue eyes. she slid her feet into his feet and one hand into the back of his head so she could move his head and eyes. then she kind of woke him up and he peered at the whole crowd as if this was his first time on planet earth and he had just arrived and was being greeted by a hoard of completely unfamiliar beings.
it was pretty amazing. then he started dancing. carefully at first with controlled movements and as time went on he got more and more free. the woman herself danced with him rather than just being the invisible force behind him, when he lent right, she`d lean left. i loved the way she used her eyes, so theatrical and provocative.
after that i watched a kind of b-boy group of jump rope artists! haha. they were sooooooo good at jump rope, i had no idea people even did things like that with jump rope. five of them and two ropes going at once, constantly changing hands while different people did break dancy style stuff in the middle.
anyway, I've just realised i cant be bothered writing about everything that happened! haha. i bought an amazing book about a cat and mouse who fight and then end up friends with the most beautiful Japanese illustrations. there was a huge children's literature market in the middle of the park and i adore children's books. i have a feeling the book was illustrated by a famous Japanese artist but i only understood about 1 percent of what the woman was talking about, and that part was when she asked me `wakari masen?` which means `do you understand?` ..... i lied and said, `yes....a little` and she laughed.
i also wandered through an intensely gorgeous peonie exhibition ..... i started smelling the peonies and wondered why no one else was doing it and before long the whole line of people wandering near me were doing it too! so cute! the smell of peonies is like nothing else, really fresh and lemony.
near the end of my meanderings (i probably walked for four hours and saw about 10 percent of ueno park) i almost completely passed by a saxophonist because i thought he was just pretending to play along to a recorded piece of music, that is how beautiful it was. but he wasn`t. he played `somewhere over the rainbow` which added to my already intense feeling that my body and mind are not as solidly connected as usual. i cried. for the second time that day because i also cried in the ventriloquist's performance, and then i almost cried when i bought that book. hahaha. i think it is to do with jet lag and stuff, because i also feel like laughing heaps. i love how travel opens up your emotions though, things you forget that you feel when life`s routines kind of numb them over.
anyway ramble ramble. xxｘ
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