Parks and Beaver Tails

Today (Monday), although many of the staff wanted up to continue work on the model, Takano insisted that we go out with our friend Kazuki from the university to Takino Ecological park, an hour south of the office. Kaz picked us up and we headed to the roughly 20 hectare park. During the winter there were cross country and downhill skiing routes, as well as snow shoeing trails. The portion that TLP designed was not open until April, but we got to see the very elaborate exterior. It was the main children's play area and was supposed to mimic animal habitat, in an effort to show children how they live. The area consisted of a human scaled ant habitat, including a series of underground tunnels, peek holes and a large ant nest to climb up; as well as bird habitats, with elaborate nests woven into groups of trees to be discovered. 

The next day we went to a park designed by Isamu Noguchi, a very famous Japanese-American sculptor. It was blizzarding outside though and quite impossible to actually go outside. Luckily there was a gallery inside a very beautiful glass pyramidal building to be explored.  Noguchi had a very difficult upbringing being half Japanese and always moving from Japan where he was rejected by his father, to America, where he was faced with a lot of racism.  In an autobiography he explains that he was interested in landscape design because it has the unique power to directly connect people to sculpture as well as the natural environment. He also believed that is was imperfections that made a thing great and beautiful, and that we should not enforce unnatural perfection standards on anything or anyone. 

That night, I promised Kazuki, to make and his cousin (who came to see the Canadians) a Canadian dessert, if he made his famous Korean food for us. With no oven, and very select ingredients from the grocery store, I found myself making 2 dozen beaver tails in the office kitchen. They were a huge success and Kazuki's very small female cousin ate about six.