Thursday

Pr came home early in the morning, well it wasn’t that early 8-ish? I was already up luckily. I went to brush my teeth and he was already gone. Bathroom is sort of outside.. well not really.. it’s more like corridor is open..(he’s got shutter which he closes at night and when no one is at home. I guess we used to have kitchen and toilet outside long time ago. I couldn’t find the sunscreen I bought yesterday so I went to a convenience store and bought another one. I was tempted to buy “onigiri”, rice ball, but couldn’t tell what was inside. This is from Japan as well. I was so surprised to see how much Japanese influence they’ve got here. Many products are not really from Japan but if they have Japanese writing on it it looks cool and they can charge a bit more. It’s like we have lots of English writing in Japan.
I got some bread again. I got online and checked out things. Well I was going somewhere I couldn’t contact anyone (Tibet) but I’m happy to be able to update my blog etc.
I went to the studio around 10am.. well I was a bit late. The lady was there 10minutes before I got there according to Cha. I felt bad but I thought she would come back again. Cha was talking to two guys when I got there. They were from their city council he said. There are two types for their job. One is something to do with army and the other one is administrative job. They were only 19 years old. Asked their name but forgot them in 5 seconds again. Finished making the piece I started yesterday. Then move on to new one right away.
We had that purple vegetable again for lunch. Cha was saying it’s better to have it at lunch time cause it’s good for your blood to circulate etc. When we were having lunch a guy came with a piece of wood. He is doing painting for temple. They reminded me of Tibetan temples but Cha said it’s very Chinese.
I got back to work. The husband of the lady I missed this morning came to paint. I told him that I missed her by 5 minutes. I hope he passed my message for her.
While I was working on my piece, I had an inspiration. I ran to see Cha and asked him to write this thing in Chinese. It’s like “Hello. I am a Japanese artist living in this town for a month for this artist in residency program. I am wondering if I can take a photo which is going to be a part of my work. If you don’t mind please point Yes if you do point NO” I’m going to print these photos on a big sheet of paper and make “paper sculpture” with it. To test out, I showed the writing to people and they all said it’s ok. Now I can take photos easily. I’m so excited with my new project!
Went home around 5pm to see if anyone is online but no one was.
Went to a supermarket for the first time. I wanted to make “okonomiyaki”, Japanese pancake, but I couldn’t find the special flower. I decided to make “Cold Chinese noodle” we have in Japan. It’s called Chinese but Chinese people never eat this. It’s like French toast which French people don’t eat. Well anyway, I looked for tomatoes but I couldn’t find it. I asked a girl if they have tomatoes in English. She shook her head and took me to the counter. She gave me a pen and paper so I drew a tomato and pointed out the colours. She got it and said that they don’t. I found mini tomatoes though.
When I got back to the camp. Cha was already cooking. We had dinner and kept talking. How he ended up with staying Japan that long and how I ended up with staying in Australia that long. We had similar path way sort of. Sue came back but she wasn’t happy. She wasted 5 hours waiting for someone. Then she disappeared again.It was already9pm and I went home. Pr was at home and we talked a lot for the first time. I showed him some video and photos of my work. Told him what I’m going to make here etc. He was pretty impressed. He told me that there is a typhoon coming here soon. I saw the TV sacreen and found out it was as big as this country. He gave me this fruit called “buntan” it was beautiful! Hao-tsu!!