Day 14 - Wednesday May 3, 2017 -
We planned for a fairly quiet day today, as it’s Constitution Day, the first of three public holidays in succession in Golden Week (tomorrow being Greenery Day and Friday is Children’s Day). We went downstairs for breakfast about 7.45. On balance, I think we concluded we hadn’t been missing anything. Coffee and orange juice of pretty average quality, croissants and bread, congee (which always looks like watery porridge to me), little rubber sausages, broccoli, steameed (sic) chicken (small slices of steamed chicken breast, which were fine), potato salad, takoyaki (which look like meat balls but which are minced octopus and which, according to Anne-Margaret, were not very good) – and surprisingly good scrambled eggs. Rich and creamy, they had not gone hard from sitting in the warmer – I suspect they only use the egg yolks and not the whites.
We headed out about 10 am to take the subway to the Modern Art Museum, which is next to the big Torii gate on the approach to Heian-jingu. I woke up in the middle of the night suddenly wondering whether the subway timetable would be different tomorrow because it’s a holiday. It is but not in a way that affects us; we need to take the 6.07 am subway and, as best we could figure out, the trains up to 9 am are unaffected and only those in the 09:00 to 18:00 time block have a revised schedule. The subway was very crowded but we got where we needed to go without any fuss.
The Modern Art Museum has a relatively small collection, mainly Asian, exhibited on the fourth floor. Three paintings in particular caught our eye (see below) for no particular reason other than they appealed, as did “Nine Years of Meditation before the Wall”, the upshot of which apparently is that birds try to build a nest on top of your head. The third floor had a Van Cleef and Arpels exhibition which we opted not to pay for as it was expensive and of limited interest to us. However, the fourth floor (general) collection had some 1980’s jewelry which Anne-Margaret was much taken with, some of it very art deco.
The two big advantages of the Museum are that (a) it’s free if you’re over 65 (and we like free…) and (b) there’s a great view of the Torii gate from the fourth floor – it’s right there in front of you.
By the time we finished it was getting close to noon so we headed downstairs to the cafe, really only looking for a drink. It was already fairly crowded with people having lunch so we figured we might as well get lunch. Most of the hot food was pasta – Anne-Margaret had hers with beef stew and I had tomato and mushroom. When they arrived, they were bubbling away in the bowls – if you served food that hot in most countries, you’d have ‘elf ‘n safety after you in no time. We sat out the back of the cafe on the terrace so it was pleasant enough and the food was certainly ok (6/10 from Anne-Margaret). Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel to get organized for our departure tomorrow.