New York vs. Tokyo

a picture a week ... from Khue in NYC and Diana in Tokyo

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Something fun in New York

There are a bunch of things in New York that are funny - whether intentionally like stand-up comedy shows, or unintentionally, but they’re just so random and weird that they qualify as funny.  For my picture, I chose something that might not win a comedy price, but as strange as it sounds brightens my day every time I see it and makes me smile (a tiny little bit). This is an ad of the Seamless campaign that runs in numerous subway trains and at subway stations. The online food ordering service plays on “funny and weird things New Yorkers do” to make their campaign relatable and actually relevant for most of the people that ride the trains and see the ads every day. Here are some more samples that I wrote about in one of my class blogs last year.

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Something fun - from Tokyo

Just your regular weekend on Ginza, Tokyos posh shopping street : literally hundreds of shoppers stopping, setting down their Louis Vuitton, Prada & Mizukoshi shopping bags and getting out their phones and cameras to take a picture of 2 cute kittens wearing scrunchies for collars that have climbed up onto a street sign! I love witnessing this easily enflamed enthusiasm for seemingly mundane things, may it be a cute pet, a beautiful flower or some beautifully prepared food!

P.S. Something more that makes me smile: I’ve done it. I’ve posted my first “cute kitten pic” to social media :P

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Something fun

This time we took a look at the funny side of our two cities. Laugh away...

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Rain - Tokyo edition

Around this time last year we had some visitors over from the UK, and took a 2 day road trip to an Onsen on the Izu peninsula, some 3 hours south of Tokyo. Amongst it’s beaches, hot springs and wild mountainous core, the peninsula is quite famous for it’s early cherry blossoms. Unfortunately, as you can tell in the picture, our trip wasn’t exactly blessed by good weather, leading to us spending a good deal more time immersed in hot volcanic water than hiking and admiring the blossoms. Just enough actually, for me to get a couple of nice Macro shots of those dripping wet beauties. I’ll most likely be missing this year’s cherry blossoms (and the picnics and drinking underneath them that are such a lovely tradition in Japan) due to some business travels to China, and am already sad about it!

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Rain in NYC

I texted Diana saying “S***, it just stopped raining when I left the house.” Normally an unusual thing to say, but totally makes sense when you’re trying to find your picture for the rain challenge. Well, I waited around a little while, trying to remember Ted Mosby’s rain dance (kidding), but the gray sky only let a couple of rain drops fall, even though the forecast said 100% chance of rain... so much for reliability. Since the rain wasn't coming from above, I started looking for other signs of rain, and I got dangerously close to a huuuuge puddle while a bus was approaching and driving right through it almost providing me with a free shower. Ultimately I found these little droplets hanging below the rail of the walkway up to Lincoln Center, one of New York’s cultural hubs and famous for operas and ballets. 

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I’m singing in the RAIN

... or taking pictures of it. Our next challenge will capture our two cities on rainy days. Stay tuned and dry - photos coming up soon!

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NYC Infinity

With a huuuuuge apology for being so unbelievably late with this, here is my Infinity picture. Even though I decided that we would take on this topic as a challenge after my best friend suggested it, I wandered around with absolutely no idea what to use as my subject. I tried a couple of "infinitely high" buildings, or "never-melting" snowmen, but none of these were really reflecting the infinity theme properly. So finally, I decided to make my way to an iconic landmark in New York, the Tiffany & Co. store on Fifth Ave, and use one of the jeweler's most popular collections as my subject. Et voilà, here you find my long overdue picture: The the silver, gold and rosegold necklaces of the Tiffany Infinity collection. 

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“To INFINITY and beyond!” Infinity challenge, Tokyo edition

 When Khue’s bestie after her most recent visit to NYCchallenged us to make “infinity” our next topic, we looked at each other (well,through Emojis on Whatsapp mind you) and said “phew…. That’s a hard one. Let’sthink of something else first”. We’ve been a little lazy at the start of thisnew year, managing only two challenges in January, but so have you, let’s put it this way, topic suggestions have been rather sparse. So how could we NOT comeback to this one. I discovered this little guy (I call him “Spaceboy”) alongthe tracks of Tokyos famous circle line, the Yamanote Line, in Shibuya .Comprised of little tiles in the style of the countless other “Spaceinvaders”wall art around Tokyo (I’ve just uploaded another series of wall art shots here, plus the old Graffiti photowalk here) it didn’t strictly qualify as a Graffiti though, and I forgot about him again. Then walking past the spot with a friend a couple of weeks ago when I pointed little Spaceboy out, said friend laughed, strechted his arm skyward and said, “Yeah. To Infinity and beyond” (I googled and apparently it’s a famous phrase from Toy Story, though me, movie illiterate that I am, of course had no clue). And this is how I found this week’s picture :)

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With a special shoutout to my best friend

... our next topic will be INFINITY.

Thanks Denise for proposing :-)

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Symmetry - Tokyo edition

After a day of trying to get a nice shot of the symmetrical lines in the gravel of the small zen garden inside the teahouse in Hamarikyu gardens, the symmetrical construction of the architecturally amazing Tokyo International Forum (which, as it turns out, isn't that symmetrical after all), or the upper stories of the National Art Center it was getting dark & I was already on my way home when I had to wait for the lights to change and saw this: just one of Tokyo's many huge pedestrian crossings - but still, with the Zebra strips running not only parallel and vertical but also often at an angle to each other, how people manage to get across without constantly bumping into each other makes for some of my favorite people watching in this town!

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NY Symmetry

My photo for the symmetry challenge was shot from the new part of the High Line that extends the park to the north into midtown. In this new part, the High Line takes a turn to the west before it continues uptown so that it almost runs along the Hudson river. The park is shaped this way to accommodate the big "parking lot" for subway trains around 34th street, which you can see in the picture.

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Next topic: Symmetry

That's all.

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Best of 2014

2014 was quite a year. Full of challenges. Full of frustrations. Full of loss and pain. But also full of a myriad of tiny moments that sparkle in retrospect, full of joy and fun. Most of all though, it was our second year in Japan. 

Firsts are always exciting. New. Shiny. Seconds on the other hand? Hmm, maybe a bit more subdued. For us the second year was all about settling in, once the novelty had washed off, and while we still discover new things almost every day that we end up staring at or talking about in wonder, we have a rhythm now. An "Alltag". 

For me, a lot of that is due to the luck of meeting some crazy people by chance in January. Fellow food enthusiasts, that, over many coffees, persuaded me to join their little venture. And bake. With Japanese. For Japanese. I always knew how much I loved cooking, and, being an event manager at heart, staging get-togethers. But I never guessed just how much I would come to love this new little "job".

So this week's pictures is a very personal "best of". You can't see anything of Tokyo in it (except maybe, out dining room table, but that's not even Japanese, but traveled across the world with us), but you can see a bit of our life as one of my Japanese students may have seen it over the last couple of months: the table, laid out in autumn colors, ready for us to sit down and enjoy the bread we had been baking for the last 3 hours.

To great 3rds - for this blog also :) 

Love, Di

P.S. if you're interested in what I was talking about: https://www.tadaku.com/hosts/2961

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Best of 2014: New York

I can't believe that 2014 is already over - the year went by so fast! And so many things happened! My picture of the year portrays one of those things that happened: My brother getting married. As a wedding gift for him and his wife, I engraved the locket, put it on the Brooklyn Bridge and took this picture for them. As this photo stands for one of the big events for me in 2014, and greatly depicts the beauty of one of New York's iconic landmarks, I thought it was perfect for the Best Of 2014 challenge.

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A new year, a (not so) new photo challenge...

Wow, I can't believe we're starting into year #3 of this. During the last year, this little blog has come to mean a lot more then an assembly of photos to both of us. It's a reason to leave the house and be tourist in our (not so unknown anymore) cities for a couple of hours (almost) each week. It's a challenge to see sides of it that are normally overlooked, or take a different perspective on things. And last but not least, it's a lifeline, a constant reason for communication, something to laugh about, with one particular very dear friend half a world away - and many others that comment, like, and have given us input along the way. Thank you for reading

Diana & Khue

And this week's subject, in keeping with a lovely tradition:

"BEST OF 2014"

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Reflections - Tokyo edition

Unlike NYC, Tokyos skyline is broken up into pieces - the Skytree, Tokyos highes building and seeming even more so due to it's isolated location in the very eastern part of town, that is otherwise the home to many temples and old, 1-2 story wooden houses, the shopping and business district spanning from Marounuchi by the Imperial Palace via Ginza - Tokyo Champs Elysees - to the relativ new area of Shiodome, and in the very West, with the Meiji Shrine & famous Shinjuku Gyoen park sandwiched between them, the 2 districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku. As mixed as the city scape are also the buildings in it. Award-winning modern buildings can be seen door to door with architectural atrocities from the 60s and 70s, and the rare traditional japanese house with it's typical curved roof. This week's pictures wasn't taken in one of the most picturesque parts of town, but on the front of just one of those horrendous, badly isolated 50 year old office buildings with it's windows starting to go blind and rust stains running along the concrete walls. But the Mosaic look of the very different buildings reflected in it, along with the Tokaido Shinkansen on it's way to Kyoto, is as typically Japanese as it gets.

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NYC Reflections

The holidays and travel kept us quite busy, but now finally, my New York reflections: I took this picture while walking around the city with my lovely visitors from Germany. I thought his glass building at 34th Street and 11th Ave would be a perfect subject for my photo, not only because its facade greatly reflects the Empire State Building and the Wyndham Hotel with its New Yorker sign on top, but also because this is a place that to a certain extent connects Diana and me. The glass front belongs to the Javits Center, the exhibition halls where the New York Auto Show takes place. I personally never worked the NYIAS, but we both certainly know our ways around exhibition centers, so I thought this is a very fitting picture for our challenge. Oh, and HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!