Ok, I had an absolutely horrific start to my birthday, but I think it turned out all right. I went to the museum with the family to see a Vincent Van Gogh exhibition, thought it turned out tickets were sold out, so we went to see the Modern Japanese Art exhibition. Though in this case "Modern" meant from around the Meiji Restoration. Still it didn't disappoint. The general theme of it was "tradition Japenese style, vs new Western style", so a lot of the paintings were mixes between traditional Japanese impressionistic portrayals, and Western style photo realistic portraits.
There were painted screens, and hanging canvases, and these amazing sculptures, like an eagle made of worked copper that had the whole individual feather thing going on, and a couple of vases with spectacularly detailed work.
Then my mother insisted I should get a birthday gift for myself from the gift shop, I picked up an origami kit, since the only art book there I was really interested in was
ridiculously expensive, and hey, origami is cool right? Maybe I'll actually wind up making use of it.
Then I spent some more time looking at the rest of the museum's exhibits till my eyes were sore, which included nifty things like their Faberge collection.
This was followed by dinner, and I spent a good hour browsing around a book store looking at interesting books. "Extinction Journals" looked to be a bizarre and interesting book about a guy who survives a nuclear apocalypse by wearing a suit made out of cockroaches, then subsequently winds up accidentally having the cockroaches eat the president, who survived by wearing a suit made of twinkies. I sort of wish I'd picked it up now.