Adventures in Japan

Art Ain't Cheap

Today was the day for the island of art. Which is to say, Benesse Art Site Naoshima. About an hour's ferry ride from Takamatsu, it consists of a couple art museums, a series of art hotels and a number of special art installations. It's pretty expensive to stay in the hotels, but in retrospect I think we should have done it. Not just because it would have really enhanced the Art Site Experience (as I'm pretty sure it would have), but because our hotel in Takamatsu is pretty awful. Not only does our room reek of stale smoke, the walls are paper, paper thin. We can hear our neighbour talking. We can hear our neighbour coughing and spitting. We can hear our neighbour urinating. We can hear our neighbour's phone vibrating in manner mode. I'm pretty sure we can smell our neighbour smoking. He buys cheap cigarettes, and a lot of them,it would seem.

Also, the cleaning staff seem far from meticulous.

Another bad decision I made recently: renting bikes to get around Naoshima. Standard Japanese bikes are not made for climbing hills. Or for people with legs anywhere near as long as ours. Add to that my uncanny ability to choose the steepest and often longest of all possible routes from point A to point B, and I think it might have actually been faster for us to walk around the island.

But the art stuff itself was all pretty cool. I'll leave it to Tyler to talk about that. I think we can all agree that he's the arty one here.