It’s been a busy week here in Tokyo. I just finished a 5 day workshop with Fiona Raby and Roger Ibers from the RCA in London entitled Me.. Only Better, and began another workshop with Jane Penty from Central St Martins. Me… Only better dealt with topics in bioengineering and the use of art to generate questions rather than cirques on the development of genetic engineering. In Jane’s workshop we are studying Japanese materials and exploring the strengths of these materials for use in new or unexpected ways. It’s been quite a good experience participating in these intensive workshops, and even while trying to communicate complex ideas the language barrier has been quite minimal. The workshops are ran by the Design Interaction Department at Musabi which is much more research focused than the CommD departments here or at Pratt.

I’ve finally had a chance to go through all the photos from Bryan and I’s trip to Kyoto last week. We had a great four days. We ended up not going to Osaka. Because the weather was so nice, we rented bikes and cruised Kyoto. We were a few weeks early for the trees to start turning color, but the city was beautiful none-the-less.
Bryan headed home Sunday night, and this week is still break at Musabi. I’ve been riding my bike around, catching up on work, and working on a refresh to my own site. I’ve moved all my travel logs to the main page of my site, and will update here from now on.

Sam Stroube
Leopalace21 Kitamachi
4-17-3 Kitamachi, Kokubunji-shi
Tokyo, Japan 185-0001
Room 107

94 cents postage will do it.

Walking though the cafeteria the other day, I spotted this shirt. I didn’t quite believe it at first. The IBEW in Evansville is less than a mile from my house.  Actually I still don’t believe it. I come half way around the world and there’s an Evansville, Indiana shirt.  People in Ohio haven’t even heard of Evansville.  Apparently she picked up this shirt at a thrift store (to the best of my understanding).

Went to a Toys-R-Us in downtown Tokyo Monday on a ‘research’ mission with my Information Design group. Everything was pretty standard; although I never had a My First Sushi Set to go along with my easy bake oven.  We then went to the observation deck of the Sunshine 60 building, which has an incredible view of Tokyo at night.  100 Drawing class has been interesting, although we haven’t actually done any drawing yet.  We spent Monday playing Japanese icebreaker games, quite a feat when you don’t speak Japanese very well.  Tomorrow I should get a better feeling of what the class will be like,  we start drawing lines.

Wow, so it’s October already.  Monday morning I start my ‘100 Drawing’ class. It meets 6 days a week, for 3 hours each morning until Art Festival, the last week of October.  I’m still not entirely sure what we’ll be doing, but it is a foundation class here.  The syllabus says that the entire second week is dedicated to drawing line.  We’ll see.  My mom and brother are coming over in two weeks, I need to start planing some activities and look into renting bikes.  Have some new photos on flickr, now that I have a computer to upload them with again.

Went to downtown Tokyo today with the other exchange students. A gallery that one of the fashion professors owns was having an opening and we were all invited.  We headed down right after lunch because we were going to visit the garment district first. When we got off the train we didn’t know which direction to go. We found that there were many temples and shrines in this neighborhood, so we walked up and down a few streets before trying to find our way.  The gallery was in a small two story building down a small backstreet in Shibuya. Several artists had clothing and drawings on display, some of whom are recent graduates of Musabi.  The space was very nice and I had a chance to meet several professors from Musabi, as well as a Kabuki singer who preforms around Japan.