Sunday Catch-up ~Art Week

Well, it's been a good week, and I've got a few photos to put up for a change :]

I had a bunch of night shifts this week which was great for doing whatever I wanted in the daytime, with just a bit of extra sleep-in time XD So one evening, Dad & I went on a little drive around to enjoy the evening and stopped at the Telford Steam Railway for a while. There was even a gent who worked there just doing a couple of things to one of trains and he let us in for a closer look and told us a little info about the place, how cool was that? x3

Another week, more pretty lilies x3 These yellowy ones are the only ones of their type in the garden.

Later on in the week I went with a friend to see 'Hiroshige’s Japan', an exhibit in the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. I'm not sure if I was allowed to take photos...but it didn't say I couldn't, so? Aha. It was worth the look anyway, although it wasn't a large collection. I learnt a bit about wood-block printing and got a lot of wanderlust. This was one of my favourite paintings, showing a man riding his horse into a small village in the snow.

I'm not sure if you can see what's going on here, but basically Face and I took a drive after winning a table on ebay xD When we collected it we hadn't measured the car or the table so it was kinda pot luck as to whether it would fit or not. As you can see, it did! Juuuust. I have a rather small Daihatsu and it still managed to get a full size table and 4 chairs in the back XD Now the challenge is to find somewhere in the house to put it until we move into our place.

Today a friend and I met up in Wolves and went to check out a little car display at Bantock House. There were only like 6 old cars there, all of this type (I don't really know what you would call this kind of spoke-wheeled car) but we had a look and got some photos.

Later we went onto Birmingham and spent hours mooching around the place looking for these owl sculptures that'd all been painted by different artists in varying themes. It was a lot of fun, I like collecting and I like mooching around, so this was my kind of day! We found just over 30 in the centre of Brum, which I'll tell you more about another time :] We then went on to have all-you-can-eat sushi for tea, where we rolled out from about an hour and a half later. OMG sushi is so filling x.X
I hope you had a good week too? Sadly I'm back on a normal shift pattern next week but hopefully I'll find more fun (& cheap things!) to do x3



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Exploring Odaiba, Tokyo

Still passportless, still dreaming of travel. Particularly prominent in my mind is our trip to Tokyo last year, and how much I want to go back!
I thought I would tell you a little about what there is to see in and around Tokyo, maybe you'll see why it keeps playing on my mind, or maybe it'll encourage you to go too!
Japan was a big leap for me for travel. Although I've been wanting to go for a long time, I was really afraid of the language barrier. When we finally booked to go I was still really afraid, but with Face encouraging me I was even more keen to go. As it turns out Tokyo is such a high traffic area for tourists and foreign business men I really had nothing to worry about, I even had a couple of people apologise to me for not being able to put their english across to me clearly enough for me to fully understand. I was like, are you kidding?! I'm in your country, with zero language skills and YOU'RE apologising to ME?
So today I thought I'd tell you about what we found to do in Odaiba, a popular small island for couples to go as there's so much light entertainment.

We caught the subway, a huge help in our touring about as there were english maps available and the ticket machines can be changed to English so you know where you're booking a ticket to! They are also as prompt as they are famous for and most run every 10/15 minutes :] While we waited we checked out some nearby vending machines anyway XD

First thing we did when off the subway was go find Joyopolis, a large arcade run by Sega. You need to buy special token and then you can use those to play on some of the big games, like a drifting racing game Face had a go on where he actually had to get into a car to play! It moved to go with the game which was pretty cool x3 I'm not big into arcades, but I went into a horror shooter with Face where we were sat in a cart and had to shoot at zombies on the screen as we 'traveled' around the game. I didn't do very well but I had fun XD We also played on things I find more enjoyable, like this complicated version of air hockey, which since playing here I've also seen in numerous places across the UK XD

Across from Joyopolis is a large shopping area which also has more vintage arcades. I played a few rounds of pinball over there and we had a good mooch around the souvenir shops, I could've bought so much! I managed to limit myself to a couple of keyrings and some tabi socks XD

We went out then to save spending all our time in the shops, and went to find some food. Because it is an entertainment place there are a lot of fast food places, and terrible as it is, we had to try a Japanese McDonalds! I'm sure we were judged as we were in there but there is something about foreign Maccies tht you just have to try them and see if they are any better! As it turns out, it was better than UK McD's XD
From there we wandered on and found a small version of the Statue of Liberty in the bay that overlooks the rainbow bridge! Very random! We took a few shots then went to see what this strange shaped building was all about... v

It was the head office for a TV company, but they had built it as a tourist attraction too as you could go into the ball piece and look out over Odaiba and the city beyond the harbour. It was quite interesting and if I remember, not too expensive for a lookout point. We sent a while wandering around there as there was a little leaflet stamping game for kids that I was determined to complete for the journal I was doing :x

When we left the weather was starting to cloud over even further and it was making the day seem a little dark, I was starting to get afraid that we would miss seeing everything as it was getting late. However, as we wandered round the back of one of the blocks of buildings we came across a candle sculpture and then this massive 'life size' Gundam statue! It's a popular feature of Odaiba and lots of people were getting their pics taken with it. Nearby was a shop for everything Gundam, but we didn't go in, instead wandering down the front to find 'MegaWeb' which turned out to be a car museum! Just Face's thing XD It was free to get in and we even got to sit in a Delorean and see some drift cars.

Further down the front was another huge arcade, this one was completely massive! Face was enthralled and while I played for a while and explored the gatcha machines, I was soon overtaken by jetlag and napped next to Face while he was on a winning streak on some huge 2p-type machine. He had a go on some grabber machines before we left and eventually won some snacks for us XD

As we left I got some shots of this impressive ferris wheel which had light patterns that changed constantly. We would've had a go, but it was getting a little chilly and we weren't sure when our last subway train was, as it was already 10pm! We certainly managed to fill a day around Odaiba and probably could've again, it's definitely a must see when going to Tokyo x3
Did you like my little rundown of exploring Odaiba? Would you like to see more of what we did around Tokyo? Let me know x3



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Project Wednesday ~More La De Dah Smashbook

This Project Wednesday I didn't want to bring back the Thai Smashbook just yet, so I thought I would go through a few more pages in the La De Dah book, it's been about a month, ne?

This was one of the last pages I did as I was waiting for myself to be finished with my Japanese travel book so I could work out what scraps I had left over to put in here. When I saw that the travel journal wasn't going to be done before this I sorted some stuff out just to make this page x3 A lot of the stuff is from the Tokyo Skytree but I also managed to find bits and pieces from all over our trip.
I managed to use stuff I got from Japan for pockets and then put in some travel sheets from a couple of the smash pads from extra details. This page also has built in photo pockets so I put a postcard I sent to myself in one and train station stamps in the other, then decorated them with leftover stickers I had from the skytree and Tokyo tower.

Face's birthday followed and a few of the staff at work made him a card to give him when we all visited the pub in the late evening XD Earlier in the day just the two of us had been to play mini golf in the new pitch that had opened at the local town park, we were the only ones there so we played each hole twice XD
I got the card and golf scoresheet to put in the photo pockets, and used some lined index cards with bunting washi to write on and decorate the page a little more. I also took out my instax during the day and got a shot of him unwrapping his presents first thing, then later playing minigolf x3

This first page came about as an amalgamation of most of the things I got up to around September-November that weren't really enough to make there own page of, but I still wanted to record, so I've stuck in a business card from the tattoo shop I got got my forearms tattooed at, my ticket to go see Seether in Birmingham, and part of a chocolate box that one of my favourite customers gave to the staff when he left for another job.
The other side, which is split with a graze box lid as i liked the autumn theme to it is about all the Graze boxes I'd received up to that point. I really don't like what I did with this page, I tried to use an envelope that came with my first Graze box to hold all the little notes that come with every box, then got some small pictures I printed with my zink printer to show a few, but then I couldn't figure out a place for the pictures in a way I liked, without covering up the picture on the lid of the box page or the picture on the ladedah page that i really liked and wanted to keep. I ended up putting them to one side of the lid as you can see and using cleaned graze pot lids to make sure the page on the right wasn't completely blank under the envelope, and as they're see through it was an effort to preserve the page I liked underneath...yeah it didn't really work out ;d

This page was done for my longest term fandom- My Little Pony! I knew I was going to miss out on the 2014 convention and was pretty gutted, so I gathered together all the stuff from the 2013 con and stuck it all in with some writing about my collection and missing out ;p This page didn't really have many design elements to it, I pretty much did just 'smash it all in'! I did try and make little bits a bit bolder though with using washi tape to bring them out the page more.

This page was a year in the making as we did a night every month with another couple from work, going out and trying restaurants we'd not tried in the local area but heard a lot about. It kinda lost it's point towards the end of the year as we ended up getting takeaways a couple of times and staying in. Still, I managed to collect enough stuff from the various places we did visit to make this page X3 I got some business cards, which most places do, and even pikey'ed a napkin from Zizzi's just cause it had their name on it. Sometimes I wonder where the line is between smashing memories and just plain hoarding...

I'll leave you with this two page spread- about the ComicCons I attended first in Telford, then in Birmingham! I had a great time at both, there's just no beating a good con x3 I used stuff that I bought when I was there, like the Isabelle print, and also cut up the con magazine, because we went to see the Red Dwarf panel x3 On the other page I mostly stuck in business cards i collected from the stalls I either bought from or wanted to buy from and put in the receipt from the japanese restaurant we went to after to complete our evening x3 Well, I hope you enjoyed another more detailed look at this book, hope you liked these pages! If you found them inspiring let me know! X3



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This Time Last Year ~May 2014

By contrast with April 2014, May 2014 I took a ton of photos! But it was because I went on holiday, so not sure if you can count it as a success or not, particularly as I only took photos while I was away xp So, this time last year we went to Tokyo, Japan. Both Face and I have long been dreaming about a visit to Japan so we were pretty excited, and it was awesome *.*

In such a large city, we kind of expected the mild sense of fear many people who live in cities radiate, a kind of fear of not knowing who is walking near them and being so singular in such a large place, but we felt none of it! Even in a country whose language is so different from our own, many signs were in English and people made an effort to talk to us, it was so welcoming! We had a great time exploring as much as we could in the 12 days we had, travelling easily on the subway system and even getting a train out of town to Yokohama.

Our hotel was old fashioned but fit for purpose and our view totally made up for it anyway, as we directly overlooked the Tokyo Tower, a tower built to resemble the Eiffel Tower in Paris. At night it lights up different colours depending on the day or occasion, and I would sit on the sill of our window just to watch the view in the odd slow moments we had :]

And although Tokyo is known as one of the most modern cities, there were plenty of throwbacks to what it had been when it was known as Edo, with historical buildings like this shrine entrance melding in with the large city buildings surrounding it. We visited lots of shrines and also the palace gardens and a few parks, to get away from the city bustle a little.
Looking back on it now, I really miss Tokyo, there was something about it that just felt so right! I definitely need to return, and soon! Have you ever felt like this about a foreign country? Let me know, I'm always looking for new places to explore!


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