Tokyo flea market

One of my favourite activities while traveling/in life is going to flea markets, so it's maybe not a surprise that I made sure to go to at least one while I was in Tokyo. This will probably be the first of many flea market posts on this blog.

Early(ish) on a Saturday morning, I set out to catch a train from Komagome.



Saw a couple of cuties about to start their day.



I took the JR loop to the Tokyo Monorail line, and got off at Oikeibajo Mae. There was a lot of interesting stuff going on here: a mix of high rises, canals, wide open water, and horse stables.







As I left the station, this sign assured me I was heading in the right direction.



After a quick once-over, I located some yakitori and takoyaki, which I ate on a curb.





I wish I'd had the nerve to take some better pictures from the less sparse areas of the flea market, but this was the general setup.



Life imitates art.
   

I bought a really beautiful speckled bowl from this man reading a newspaper.



All in all, this was one of the best mornings I had in Japan. I found a lot of cool things (mostly breakables) that I carried around for the rest of my trip. I also found it weirdly easy to bargain with the vendors, despite that not really being a thing in Japan, and despite my extremely limited Japanese.

Montréal pt. I

Last September, after an intense month of work, Murk and I booked a weekend trip to Montréal, 6 years after we went on a trip there in the early days of our friendship.

This trip was much-needed. I was about to leave for Dresden for three months, and Murk had just finished her thesis. It marked the end of an era (~1 year) during which we worked in the same building (on the same floor), met outside for coffee breaks, and shared french presses of tea and comfort.

After a typically haggard Megabus journey, this was the first bud we met in the neighbourhood.





Obviously we stopped by St. Viateur and Café Myriade on our first morning.





Followed by a nice stop at Jean Talon.





We peeped a couple of fashionistas on the street.









The next morning we went to a place called Larry's, which had amazing tapas-style breakfast.





That afternoon, we hung around Café Bloom and surrounds before making our way back to Mile End.

Leipzig/hypezig pt.I

One Saturday morning last fall, my Dresden companions and I made a little trip to Leipzig for the day. I'd been once before (for an unforgettable night/morning at IfZ... more on that in a different blog post, maybe), but I needed to go back. I didn't really have a functioning camera the first time I went, and I could only see so much of the city on 0 hours of sleep.

My goal that day was to wander around and see as much art as I could. Leipzig is a really beautiful, sparse, and spread-out city -- a place I feel I could go back to a lot. We started the day walking from the train station in the general direction of Plagwitz, a historically industrial neighbourhood where a bunch of art stuff is concentrated.

These buddies were slipping around on the ice in Clara-Zetkin park. We probably spent a good 20 minutes watching them along with a 5-year-old kid and his mom.



One of many cool elderly Leipzigers exercising early in the morn.



We finally got out of the park and made our way westward through the canals.







After a cake break, we stumbled across a lil' holiday market.





Eventually we made it to the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, a massive "reclaimed" cotton factory complex.













We spent the evening at a bar called Kune on Eisenbahnstraße (about which countless articles have been written), on the other side of town. Few bars have made me feel so comfy, for real. I had a delicious beer called Bubi Helles, and we called it a night.