My friend Maou, from one of my culture groups, owns an art gallery with her mom, in Ome. The gallery is in their family home, a 150 year old farm house. In English it's called the Worth Gallery.
>Last month they held a daruma show. Starting in early December, local artists, residents, anyone really, could buy a plain, white, unpainted daruma to decorate/create for the show. The finished daruma(s) were then put on display in January, at 5 different locations throughout Ome: some in the gallery itself, the others divided between a cafe, 2 ryokans (Japanese-style inns) and a restaurant. You could pick a map from the gallery, then spend the day moving from location to location, checking out all the super cool daruma(s). Which is just what we did about 2 weeks ago.
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Worth gallery
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Some of the daruma were for sale. In the bottom left corner you can see a bit of the robot daruma that I bought, I also bought the 3rd one up, the red, flowery one. I bought one other super cool one, but now I'm loving that yellow above! I'm not picking them up until this Thursday, I'll post pix when I get them.
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We ate lunch at the restaurant, Irori, where a portion of the daruma were on display. I've given up on trying to identify anything I eat in a Japanese restaurant. Any of my Japan blogging buddies, feel free to chime if you recognize anything!
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In front of the restaurant was this super old-fashioned foot onsen, it was actually heated by a fire underneath!
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Our feet in the tub! I'm in the blue jeans. It was a cold day and my feet were aching from walking all over town, so the onsen was the perfect ending to the day!>
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2 comments:
What a great outing! I wish I lived closer to your culture club. Those daruma are too cool! The temple at the end of our street has a big daruma festival every year but only the stock standard red ones. I'd LOVE a groovy daruma in my entrance way. The postie'd probably keel over!
Oh and I believe you ate a slice of orange and a single snow pea with your lunch. ;P More helpfully, irori means an open cooking pit usually 90% ash with a little fire in the middle to cook over. Was it that kind of restaurant?
They hope to make the Daruma show an annual event, I'll let you know if they're having it again next year, maybe you can combine the show with a Costco trip! They're not too far from each other!
D'oh! An orange! I knew it seemed familiar! LOL
They already had our lunch prepared and laid out in the party room, so I didn't see if they had a cooking pit. Maybe it's referring to the foot bath, since the tub sat over an open fire? LOL We joked that it was like a Daffy Duck cartoon, where he thought he was getting a nice, hot bath, but he was actually sitting in Yosemite Sam's cooking pot!
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