Tokyo! Part 3

Tokyo! Part 3
2016-05-20 Philippa Davin

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Our last day in Tokyo got a little crazy!

We had one big problem this trip, it was how to get my art back to the U.S.
All my art pieces traveled to Japan in a large custom wood box, every pieces was laying in there, safe and protected from breaking. The box weight over 90 kg (198 lbs).
The plan was that the same shipping company was going to get them back to the U.S and out of Japan. The only problem was that apperantly you can’t send anything from Japan if you’re not Japanese! We tried to make this work for so many days, without any luck!
When Monday came we were very tired from the show, all day was spent making phone calls after phone calls. It wasn’t the easiest thing to comunicate with the different shipping companies since no one barely spoke any english.
The afternoon came and we were supposed to leave Tokyo 6.30am Tuesday morning and still, no solution how to ship them back, we had to come up with another plan!
The new plan was to check them in at our flight to Sweden and then ship them from Sweden to the U.S. The only problem with this was that we couldn’t bring the whole wood box, it was way to big and heavy! How could we get this to work?
We talked to the hotel about finding a place to buy suitcases to pack them in, we found a big department store so we headed over there only to find out there was not a single suitcase we could fit the art works in!!
My dad came up with the idea of buildning new boxes that was smaller then the large box, divide the art pieces from the larger one to the smaller ones.
Trying to find the material for this wasn’t the easiest thing when you can’t speak japanese…
After a while we finally found some material we thought we could work with, I found small rubber plates, (of course they where pink) that we could put in the box to protect them from breaking.
We bought so much material, to much to cary around so we found a cab, but we could barely fit it in to tha car!
Finally back at the hotel we got to use a conference room and started the process of buildning new boxes! I wasn’t really sure this was going to work but the longer we got with every box I got more and more confident that this might work! After we worked on this for several hours we finally had two packages, wrapped with a lot of protection.

I was so nerveous to check in the packages at the flight, anyone who’s been flying know how they throw the suitcases around and are not careful at all! I was sure they were going to brake.. The 14 hours it took to get home I couldn’t stop thinking about them but when we finally got home, I took the two packages to my studio and opened them up!

They made it!! I could finally breath out, no one was broken!!

This trip is a memory for a life time! So many new friends, places I’ve seen, artists I’ve met and friends traveling around the world to support me! I am also very grateful that my 84 year old grandma went with me. She is truly amazing and a big inspiration in life, always happy and never see things as problems just as new opportunities.

Love,
P

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