Red Sky, Blue Sky

A group of kyuudou students

  

After the amusement that was Akihabara pop culture, we took quite a scenic train ride through the veritable forest of orange-lit skyscrapers and high-rises to Odaiba, the Tokyo Bay area.

The first happy accident we discovered was just outside the train station: a couple of twisted red slide-like tubes.
We then proceeded to prove the theory that all college students revert to small children when given an empty playground.

 

Elliot/Manfred (Thomas) above, and Momo-chan/So Rim below, discovering their inner children

We found a pretty little beach on the Bay where we watched a blazing watercolor sunset behind the Tokyo skyline.


Besides the gorgeous view, the evening was pleasantly cool, and despite all the people who came to enjoy the small stretch of beach, it was a quiet, pensive sort of place.

 

We also met a couple who was resting from taking their rabbit, Lemon, for a walk.



I thought Lemon was really sweet and docile for a rabbit...I mean, clearly domestic, but all the pet rabbits I've ever met were rather cantankerous...

Once it grew dark, we wandered over to Palette Town, a shopping area including a Ferris wheel, a Toyota showroom, and an outlet mall. As we searched for the food court to grab some dinner, we passed by the end of some sort of Hawaiian music festival.

The inside of the outlet mall was rather...Vegas, with pseudo-classical architecture, sky murals on the ceilings, and illusionistic murals on the walls--the kind where sunlit stone patios lined with Greco-Roman columns are painted beyond the plane of the wall. After we'd eaten, some of us wandered through the overpriced outlet shops and expensive (and some imported) clothing stores, including Levi's.

I found a piece of furoshiki, traditional Japanese wrapping cloth, whose design I fell in love with...I probably will never actually use it as furoshiki though. It just reminded me of how I imagine designed of Reiko's tattoos. But by the time we were done wandering and met up again though, we were too tired to try out the Ferris wheel, and decided to head back to the guesthouse.

Another interesting subway/train ad...