Jimbocho Booktown

The neighbourhood of Jimbocho is one of my favourite places for a field trip in Tokyo. Jimbocho is basically a 1km long alignment of used books stores. You can find a bit of everything there, from cheap magazines to pricey collectables a hundred years old. When I visit I mainly look for old books cheap enough to cut up for mail art and the such. I never came home empty handed, but there are good days and bad days, sometimes depending on what the shop keepers are willing to sell you (a bit of a tricky one for me, that's why I only go every six months or so). I will show you last week's catch at Jimbocho in a future blog.

Brushtown in the middle of Booktown?

That bone soup ramen

How can one ever NOT enter a ramen shop with giant chained bones hanging from the roof??

:-))

Of course Viz and I HAD to try that!

The chef starts his soup at 5am every day, and when the soup "fails" he won't open the shop that day. Or so he says. The soup is made with three different kinds of bones, beef, pork, and I forgot which was the third one. A lot of leek in there as well.

It's a tiny place with just enough space for a small counter (five seats). On the wall, pictures of him taken during a CNN show he featured in with Martha Stuart and….

… Kenny G :-))

Delicious! (much better than what it looks like on the picture)

P / Pee

I really like those two calendars on the walls of the farm's kitchen. Both of them only had P / Pee as an event in March. It makes Pee look very important and she sure likes this :-)) I love the natural poem behind the second calendar too. As Eeedie says, "we do have other friends too!". That made me laugh so much. Yes, I have seen some of them and they were as sweat as you are!

Hong Kong - one last batch

In broad daylight - I

I was curious to see what the city looks like in broad daylight when the neon lights don't hide the walls. Well, it's a bit like shouting to you we're ugly, so what!? (and we are proud of it too). Those are not the suburbs, by the way, this is the city centre. I still don't know why there are so many bamboo scaffolds around, the walls seem to be same old ones everywhere, no sign of the slightest fresh paint. 

It must be extremely hot in summer, each and every tiny room of the city is equipped with air conditioning (those boxes outside the windows). I mean every one. Even more than I have seen in japan.

All in all this was the best urban decay my camera has witnessed so far. A kind of urban decay paradise.

Between light and darkness

Hong Kong is blinding with lights at night, the sea of neon is almost overwhelming.
Behind the light, almost everywhere, scaffolds made of… bamboo, holding decadent structures together by god knows what magic trick, supporting human beings with the laws of a mysterious non-gravity.

Veterans Day or Any Given Day

La Misión (3) - OuterBody Experience Lab

(a branch of the Art Sluts?)