Tambores de Naiguata

Today’s deck is the Cat’s Eye Tarot. No not that one, we don’t get you mysterious girl, try somewhere else.

My usual complaints about asymmetrical backs are alleviated by the fact that the included booklet does NOT include reversed meaning. The backs do live up to the name of the deck though.

For today’s reading, it’s super interesting to get the Seven of Wands so soon after the Six of Wands.

The Seven of Wands traditionally depicts a young man with a stick trying to fend off other six sticks encrouching on him. After the glory and triumph of the previous card, this one shows the people that will try to pull you down.

“Los invidiosos” as we’d say where I come from.

So people will try to pull me down a peg or three what is one to do in those times? According to the cards “keep quiet, you already made it, they’re no threat”.

Can’t think of anything specific this would apply to, but I’m a very defensive person, so it’s a good reminder in general, really.

Big thing today was that I went with a friend, T (I’ve brought him up before) to Banpaku Kinen Koen. That’s the park where the World Fair in the 70s took place and even these days it’s a really busy park (or maybe it was busy because we went on a Sunday).

While walking to our objective (that being the Museum of Ethnology) we saw a guy doing stunts at the base of the Tower of the Sun, and spoilers: He wouldn’t be the last.

After grabbing lunch, T pointed out to me the “Tactics Ogre Map” on the outside of the museum, and I’ll be damned, it’s exactly that.

As the name suggests, the Museum is all about culture in different… cultures, but an interesting bit is that it’s not just old things. While it obviously adds the more old/aboriginal stuff, it also has more relatively recent things that have clearly formed part of the culture.

One of my favorite sections was actually this one table that had menus for Chinese restaurants from all over the world. This pic is one from CUBA of all places.

There was also a wall with, for example, copies of The Little Prince and The Very Hungry Caterpillar in as many different languages as possible.

And of course the source of today’s title. I WAS looking for any Venezuelan detail and to be fair I might’ve missed one or another but Naiguata is not a name you can mix up for anything but the place in Venzuela.

There’s something poetic in how my country is represented by a drum improvised out of a metal drum (more common than you’d think).

Afterwards we traveled to the Tower of the Sun. I don’t have pics from the inside sadly, you can only take pics on the first floor and then you need to buy a… rental phone case for 500 yen to take pics with your phone on anything above the ground floor.

So I kinda attuned myself to “no pics inside” just to be safe.

I will say though, the experience is worth it and it made me say the phrase “This is a PS1 horror game intro”. The music inside the tower made me also feel like I was stuck in The Ring, not the horror movie, the Adventure game about the Nibelung cycle. I had the streams Mandaloregaming did of streaming himself playing the game and I swear to God the ambiance was the exact same.

We went back to the Museum afterwards. What happened was that T made a reservation to go to the Tower of the Sun at 3PM so we had to do a bit of a back and forth. But when we got back we instead went to an exhbit of “Music Powts From The World”.

It was super cool because it shows a bunch of instruments from around the world, so many variants of guitars and violins that different countries came up with.

And yeah that also includes rappers.

We then decided to go back thinking “If we return early maybe we won’t have such a big crowd to deal with”.

We were wrong.

We did realize at that point that for a many people as there were, the amount of foreigners was shockingly low. Not just in the museum but in the park.

I actually want to go back either tomorrow or Tuesday to take pics with the girls. The park has a bunch of trees already changing colors.

For now I’ll just take a nap before posting this one.

UPDATE: It was a 9-10 hours nap.



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