Saturday September 10th

Last weekend there was a typhoon so we stayed in our apartment all day Saturday. It rained from Thursday night through Sunday night, sprinkled on and off on Monday and was absolutely beautiful on Tuesday. The storm cooled everything off and cut the humidity and it was actually pleasant outside for a couple days. Of course all of that wore off by Saturday and we were back to hot and humid. Because of the weather we decided to go to some air conditioned museums in Osaka. We've actually only walked around Osaka once before but travel through it so often it felt like we were regulars at the public transportation. That is until we had to use the subway in the actual city. We only got on a train going the wrong direction once and picked up on that pretty quickly so it all worked out.

We went to the National Museum of Art, Osaka and the Osaka History Museum. When I go to art museums I usually spend most of my time reading the information about paintings rather than looking at the actual paintings. I don't have that problem here. It was a pretty small museum, they seem to throw around the word "national" which makes me think the museum is going to have a rather large collection because it is representative of the nation. This doesn't seem to be the case. I wasn't allowed to take any pictures but snuck this one when the docent wasn't looking. As you can tell the art was all rather modern. We spent out time making up what everything symbolized. Unsurprisingly, Craig is very good at making up credible sounding nonsense. The entire entrance to the museum is covered by a sculpture we'd read on the internet was supposed to represent tangled bamboo. I think it looks like a winged creature.The history museum was pretty cool. I bet we would have learned more if we could read Japanese. It is known for its models and I was allowed to take pictures of them, as long as I didn't use my flash. When I asked the docent I asked in Japanese and she responded with "no flash." I asked Craig what that meant since I was still in a Japanese mind set.


These are of some ladies in the emperor's entourage. Apparently they are shade bearers.
To end the day we found a pretty good Turkish restaurant. I couldn't find it again if I tried because we were just walking around the twisty streets surrounding the train station and came upon it.