Trip to Okayama: Falling in Love with Vivaldi's Music
- Asagi Hozumi｜穂積浅葱
- Aug 29, 2024
- 3 min read
I’ve wanted to visit Fairywood Glass Museum for quite some time, and I found an opportunity in August to make it happen, as well as enjoying my first trip on the Sunrise Izumo/Seto, an overnight sleeper train.
Unfortunately the Sunrise was cancelled, so I had to use the Shinkansen to go to Shizuoka on the first night of day 0, and then stay there till the next morning.
I got on the first Shinkansen of the day to get to Okayama.
That meant a 2-hour delay on day 1, making it unrealistic to get on a ferry to go to the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island as originally planned.
It didn’t really ruin the day, because it allowed me to spend time in the sunset hours at Yoshima Parking Area, which I found rather nice when I visited it on my way to Kaii Higashiyama Setouchi Museum.
I particularly loved “残照” at the museum.
I would have loved to add a postcard of it to my collection, but for some reason, they didn’t sell it there.
What a shame.
After some very pleasant hours at Yoshima PA, I drove to Kaikatsu Club Okayama Kurashiki, where I would stay for the night and the next.
On day 2, I visited the main dish of this trip, the Fairywood Glass Museum, in the morning.
It’s not a big museum at all, but there’s a lot of artworks made of Uranium glass that glow green under UV light, which I found very delightful.
Something not very common among other glass museums is what they call “glass workshop tour space,” from which I enjoyed watching people crafting glasswares.
2 songs that hugely entertained me on the way to Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and all the way through this trip, were the 3rd movement of “Summer” and the 1st of “Winter” from Vivaldi’s violin concerto.
After this trip, I added these to my “daily essentials” playlist, on which there were only 2 other tracks before.
I must admit that I made a mistake of scheduling a 3-hour drive from Okayama to Hiroshima, on what is effectively the 3rd day of a trip with so much driving.
My need for breaks on the way meant that I could only spend 50 minutes at the museum in Hiroshima, despite my original plan saying 1.5 hours.
I should plan a trip sometime in the future, just in Hiroshima without having to drive such long ways.
The Ohara Museum of Art, which I visited on day 3, was unexpectedly good.
“春の光” by Torajiro Kojima was my favorite artwork there, and I wanted a postcard of it just like “残照” by Higashiyama, but of course, given my luck, they didn’t have it.
Such a shame.
After returning the Honda Fit, I spent the rest of the day at Kaikatsu Club near Okayama station.
I had a terrible time going home!
With Shinkansens being cancelled left, right and center, it took me whopping 12 hours to go home (including a meal at T’s Tantan Tokyo Station, which was the only nice time), by getting on a Shinkansen, then a Thunderbird, and then another Shinkansen, all of which terribly crowded, going all the way through Kanazawa and Toyama, where I had a wonderful trip last year (I saw the Toyama Glass Art Museum from the train window!).
Commentaires