Entries this day: Days Jessica_railroad-museum

Days

8:05am JST Friday 30 April 2010 (day 14646)

Wow. Days have gone by without me having written. I know a lot of time has been spent chillin' at home, and a lot of time has been spent chillin' with Lisa. A little time has been spent gettin' my visa, and a bit more time has been spent meetin' people for Cow-Go.

Yesterday Soness led a workshop on visionboarding at Ben's Cafe in Takadanobaba. I largely enjoyed it, and had some suggestions for how she can make it better next time.

I enjoyed the visualization most. I hadn't previously done anything like it. Contact Soness for deets.

Also, I ran on the beach yesterday, and came back without injuries.

Ohhh I know what I need to post in here, a story about the rain which I wrote on my iPhone and have posted to FB but not here.

This morning I had a dream

On some sort of game show, or recording something for TV where I got to surf along a conveyor belt, pretending to have my eyes closed. The first time, my eyes were open, so I naturally kinda directed where I went. The second time I actually closed my eyes, but I had the path memorized so I was still able to direct my path.

Jessica railroad museum

9:09pm JST Friday 30 April 2010 (day 14646)

Went to the Railroad Museum with Jessica today, for what we plan to be our last time to hang out before I go to Thailand. I took a couple of pictures near the beginning of our trip and uploaded them with the hashtag #railroad-museum.jp cause that's the URL of their website. In the museum are several full size old school locomotives and passenger cars some of which we can touch, board, sit down, play with the disabled switches and levers. A couple of trains we may not even touch, notably the Emporer's train from I'll guess 60 years ago, each car of which was in its own glass room.

The upper floor overlooks the train cars, and has a button we can press to raise or lower the pantograph (thing that smurfs electricity from the overhead line) on one of the trains.

On the other end of the museum, things are even more explicitly hands-on. There are hourly training sessions on how to close the doors at a station (including checking clock, turning on and off the all-aboard music, getting on the train, closing the door, looking for the all-clear, closing the doors, looking for the light to be off, and tell the driver to go!), how to run the green car ticket window, and maybe how to run the ticket machines.

Next to that area was a set of computers on tables for which we could sign up for a 30 minute session on "designing" our own train (picture). The choices were quite limited on each page, and not fully-easy to go back and forth, but we chose body type, shape of windows, paint color, stripe or not, number of doors, background image, etc. I may remember to scan mine and upload it.

All of that was on the ground floor. On the 2nd and 3rd floors was the train version of a kids' science museum, where everything was hands-on, and lights and moving things and spinning things, all related to trains.

On the "roof floor" we had a view of the surrounding area, including a couple of trains on one side, and shinkansen line on the other. We actually had come up right at the right time to see two shinkansen go by. Only problem is that though there are outdoor windows to keep us on the roof, the windows' supports limit the view of the trains.

Stayed until the place closed, and had ice cream across the street at MiniStop (where we had had lunch, avoiding the crowds and prices in the museum). Then headed to Omiya for proper dinner (at CoCoIchi curry shop).

It was Jessica's first time to eat there; she got om-rice curry of normal spicyness, and I got vegetable curry for sweet tooths. Mine was yum, and hers was a bit spicy, but we both enjoyed everything. At the very end of that, as we had been talking about different things, including Lisa, I was like, "yah, I think I like Lisa."

In Ikebukuro we hugged for a long time, our last time to hug before I go to Thailand for 3 months. Bittersweet.