Jo: Thanks. Wonderful sketches of handheld and table tops with many items on. Love the elegant lines on the table leg too.
Joan: Thank you. Love your sketch of the sailboats and the garden at the botanical garden. Excellent drawing of floor tiles.
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
I think
Tokyo is a super big city but it has many variety of things for everyone's liking. It only takes 6 hours flight from Tokyo to Bangkok Thailand. We often stopped at Narita airport during our USA trip but we had never got out of Narita to visit Tokyo before, until our recent trip last week. The hotel we stayed was very close to train station, food shops, postoffice, etc. and also situates in between both the old Japanese town section called Asakusa (the local call it A-Sak-Sa) and the Kitchenware district called Kappabashi. I remembered walking behind a nice young white man dressed casual in black and white T-shirt... but seemed special somehow from other ordinary foreign tourists... Then he strolled into one of the big knife shops at Kappabashi... Then my thinking was OK... He was a young professional chef. Besides, there are also several of Japanese fake food model shops in Kappabashi, that you will love to sketch. They look so real and cute. We stopped at one of the shop that had a 1.5 feet high replica of super tall burger... that look so real and fun to see at the same time. I think you will enjoy sketching at so many kitchen shops front of Kappabashi and Asakusa. Besides, Tokyo has several of interesting Parks too. We only did visit a small corner of one park, Ueno park. I wish I could find the giant blue whale statue in Ueno park and sketch it... but there was no time for me. Besides, for artists like us... there are so many mega art supplies shop for us to check out, the best one in our opinion was "Sekeido" in Shinjuku.
Besides, Japan has so many good train systems, once you figure out how to take local train in Tokyo using their tap-and-go IC card, call Suica or Passmo, then your life is easy. Their Tokyo train stations also have good elevator systems to accommodate the wheel-chair or elderly people. All train information is also shown in English. Tokyo is super clean and safe as well. All people we met were very polite. For us, our girls love the anime epic center call "Akihabara"... just so many giant buildings, multi floors full of anime model, cards, and game stuffs.
And for all 4 of us, we love shopping at Daiso shop (most items are 100 yen) and a more premium items shop called "Don Quijote" or "Donki" for short. Besides, we also went to many location of Bookoff, and Hardoff (discounted book and hardware items). We did not buy stuffs that many, but for us it is fun to just roam and browse cool stuffs.
I lucky got some discounted cool art books (in Japanese though): one was the auto bio of the late famous Japanese children book wc illustrator,
Chihiro Iwasaki ... some of her works are shown
here,
the other is drawing instruction books that I love. At Sekeido, there are many best anatomy for anime illustration books, that have wonderful highlight of muscle section in color codes. Just amazing.
As this was our first family trip to Japan together, we decided to based our trip entirely 6 nights in Tokyo as I found out that we can easily take a train day-trip to Mt.Fuji (Fujisan) and back to our hotel in Tokyo in the evening.
And of course, I am a foodie, so the visit to "Kimuraya" in Ginza, the first western bakery in Japan to taste out their breads, and special Anpan (bread with red-bean filling.. Japanese signature bun) was absolutely strikes my heart glow. I hope to go back there for more leisure restaurant meal on their 3rd floor.
If one day, you and Jerry decide to go, I can hint you the name of our Tokyo hotel that we really like (but the square feet is typical super small for Tokyo real-estate though). This trip, we did not book any museums or shows, or zoo tour though... we just wanted to keep our trip simple by going to places that always open to us, whenever we feel like visiting as we hope we can come back to Tokyo and other parts of Japan in the future.