Today I worked on a short PowerPoint presentation for a meeting next week. I have been trying to take some advice from Presentation Zen and make keep everything a little cleaner and simpler and use a few visuals to emphasize my message. It is so easy to want to try and include more and more on a page and turn it into slideumentation. I am so tired of looking at presentation made by me or others that include too much text, too many graphs and just waste printing costs.
February, 2007 Archives
Many stores in Japan, especially older local shops, still take one day off each week. While I was walking around the side streets of Asakusa in Tokyo I noticed how some stores have painted the shutters on the front of the store to look like and old Edo scene.
If you ask me, I think it really adds to the atmosphere and certainly makes up for some of the disappointment of the store itself being closed.
While in Japan I made a quick trip back to my old “hometown” in Nagano. It is a small village called Nakagawa in the soutern part of Nagano prefecture. Nakagawa is located in the Ina valley with the Central Japan Alps on one side and the Southern Japan Alps on the other.
It is a relatively rural area. Below is the view I have after getting off the highway bus in Iijima, the next town up the valley from Nakagawa.
Next is the view I have from outside the home I stay at in Nakagawa. Empty rice fields and mountains.
It was pretty cold when I visited with snow falling in higher elevations. Homes here rarely have anything like central heating so evenings are spent sitting on the floor under a table with a heater built into it called a “kotatsu”. I didn’t think to take a picture, but it is definitely an important part of winter-time life in rural Japan.
I visited the Ooedo Onsen Monogatari on Wednesday. An onsen is a Japanese hot spring commonly used for bathing.
This one is a little different from other onsens in that is has a bunch of restaurants inside done in an Edo (name of old Tokyo) style town-scape. Visitors change into yukata and walk around the town area before or after having their bath.
Onsen are usually located in mountainous areas where there is a lot of volcanic activity. However this one is located in a new part of Tokyo on land that was actually reclaimed from the sea. This area of Tokyo is called Odaiba. It has a lot of relatively new buildings with apartments, offices, shops and restaurants. You can see the Rainbow Bridge connecting Odaiba to downtown Tokyo in this picture.
Another popular attraction in this area is the Venus Fort shopping mall. It reminds me a lot of the indoor shopping mall at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
I visited Asakusa today. The weather was great and I had a nice look around this part of old Tokyo (not my first time). The main attraction is the Sensoji (Senso Temple) and shops lining the street up to it.
No matter what day of the week it is (this was a Wednesday), there always seems to be a large crowd. I guess lots of tourists like myself.
I had lunch at a place called Katsuji. They specialize in different kinds of “katsu” or deep fried pork cutlets. Instead of just being a pork filet, they have over 50 varieties including ones stuffed with cheese, gyoza (dumplings), miso, etc. Whatever you can imagine I think they have. It was a good find.
You can get an idea of what I am taking about from the window displays. Like many restaurants in Japan, they have a display of very real looking plastic food in the window.
A small family business, the waitress was very nice and even spoke excellent English having apparently lived in L.A. for a number of years.