May 14, 2015

Day 4: Island Hopping

Yet another day of transportation and skipping meals, can you tell I'm grumpy about it? I guess our schedule is so jam packed and we always have a bus to catch to stay on time so we just have to catch food wherever we can. So lunch consisted of rice donuts and ice cream, and dinner consisted of one Oreo and two jelly beans. Luckily I had a really great breakfast to wake up to, served by our accommodations and I have that to look forward to tomorrow after our 5am wake up call. I can't wait until we finally have some days off so I can spend the entire time eating!


Anyways, onto today where we island hopped between two islands within another island. So we were catching busses and ferry's all day long. We went to Teshima island to see the Teshima art museum and the Yokoo house, both of which were created by architects that I have never heard of until this trip. They were both absolutely incredible and of course no pictures allowed inside. :(



The inside of the art museum is something that I really cannot explain, but it was definitely an architectural experience. Like most museums you had to take your shoes off before entering and you walked into a large concrete dome like structure with two holes pen to the sky. The shadows were amazing and the floor itself was a piece of art. The entire floor was computerized to push water droplets up from above the concrete and the whole thing was orchestrated to move in a certain way. The puddles would slowly form and once they got big enough they would start to run in every direction. It was so cool to watch and I had so many different things to look at that I accidentally stepped on a puddle twice.




Next we walked to the Yokoo house which was another entire experience. As you can see from the photo the house was built with this really interesting red plastic and dark, burnt wood walls. The red walls transformed the house because the artwork on the walls became completely muted due to the red. There was also a rock garden in the backyard where the rocks were painted red, but when viewed through the wall they looked white. The best part of the house was that the rock garden and pond literally ran right through the house and a glass floor allowed you to see below and you could watch the fish swim under you and the house.

After I was already in love with this house we traveled back to Awaji Island to go see the Tadao Ando museum. My favorite part about this house was the models of some of his most famous projects inside. They had the chi chi art museum which we already visited and the church of the light and another house he had done. All of the models were build out of real materials and were so detailed. It was very inspiring to see these scale models of some incredible projects that have been built.




Our last stop of the day was kind of spontaneous but while walking along the road home we stopped at a shrine called the Goo shrine. I won't post any pictures now because I'm pretty sure we will be going to many more shrines once we get to Kyoto, but the best part about this shrine was the "stone chamber." We had to walk through this very narrow door and hallway and reached a completely dark room that had hall been carved out of stone. There was a glass staircase in front where light came through and a small puddle on the floor which reflected the light. It is very hard to explain, and this post is too long so I am stopping now. Kyoto tomorrow!

1 comment:

  1. Why isn't the text showing up on this post? All I see are pictures and lots of blank lines.

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