_valerian

past few days:

Went to an apartment designed by Tadao Ando across the street from the Tokyo Art Museum with my friend Nara to see a photo slide show by a famous photographer whose name I forgot, and there next to that photographer was none other than Jun Itoi running the laptop which the slide show depended on. Once the lights came back on I was suprised to see Atsuko Hirota there as well. At the party/reception afterwards I met for the first time Taeko Jingu. After that Atsuko, Nara and I along with a photographer with a Canon Eos 1s whatever 8 thousand dollar digital camera around his neck, a high school teacher who convinced me that I do indeed need a Leica M5 after he showed me his, and a Tokyo University graduate who is now employed at Canon and helped engineer their recent image non-shakeable lenses. You can tell I know nothing about Canon cameras, and even the engineer said he liked Nikon better. We all headed to Shimo-kitazawa to a small french resturant for dinner. One foot in the door and I knew that I was not going to get away with out leaving a significant portion of my wallet’s innards in the register. 5000 yen… I promise you that I did not eat 5000 yen worth of bread or salami. This is the deal that one who does not drink alcohol in a country gets where dinner tabs are split evenly amongst the participants. After that Nara, Atsuko and I headed over to Cafe Yuitto in Shinjuku, which made it my third trip there in three days.

Saturday I left my card in a Shinjuku Mizuho bank ATM. This was noticed today, Tuesday morning when I went to the local ampm ATM. This has been resolved though.

The Moriyama, Shinjuku, Araki photo exhibition is amazing. I plan on seeing it again.

What else? Oh, other things too. Thats for later though.