11.02.2018 TOKYO

We spent almost the whole day in Odaiba, a huge artificial island in the south-east of Tokyo.
First of all, we visited the Miraikan Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. It had lots of interesting information to offer, one really big and detailed part of the exhibition was energy in general and how it might be possible to use different forms of energy for our benefit, replacing fossil energy long-term. I also learned a lot more about conductive polymers, which I only briefly heard about before.

On one floor, one could walk into a formerly used part of the International Space Station, which is now in use as a museum piece. Inside, we saw a collection of different dehydrated food (which all had a “best before” in 2014 or so?), the toilet they used up there and a film of an american astronaut giving a tour inside ISS. I found especially interesting that their sleeping bags are mounted on the wall in small extra rooms – they keep their personal belongings in them as well.

Anyway, we also went to a demonstration of the robot “ASIMO”, I’ll show you in the video below how it looked like. What was the most impressive part of that demonstration was it’s ability to jump on one foot, executed ever so smoothly – I honestly did’t expect it to be able to do that. Sadly, I did’t get it on tape, but I think your imagination will do.

After walking through the permanent exhibition, we explored the rest of Odaiba: We went to Venus Fort, a shopping center, that was deemed interesting by some tourist guides. On the way there, we passed through a temporary exhibition called “History Garage”, which showed life (and lots of Toyota) in 1960, pretty sweet. Then we were completely blown away by the shopping center itself. It had a ceiling that imitated the sky and the storefronts were all built into a stone-facade, which was already beautiful on it’s own. The most striking part of the shopping center however was the huge fountain in the middle, which was simply amazing. Another thing worth noting is the grand amount to pet shops, which all offered lots and lots of mini-dog or cats clothing, the “Family” section in the basement was full of them.

Next to Venus Fort there was an actual Toyota exhibition/store (I think it served as both), where they showed off the interior of some cars and “futuristic” designs. Also, there was a section for the “Athletes of Toyota” (the ones sponsored), where one could more or less try out parts of the athletes training.

Then we strolled along the port, in some kind of seaside-park, trying to find our way back to the museum, as we also purchased the special exhibition “MOVE”. Turns out, that was definitely made for children, and there were only about 5 attractions and you had to queue about 40 minutes each. We only did one of them – 5 seconds of sliding down a ramp in a penguin costume, it actually was fun though.

After getting off the island again, we went to eat somewhere around Shimbashi station. There we came across one of those restaurants for the first time where you had to order food at a machine outside the restaurant and then wait to go inside until your food is ready. We didn’t eat there however, but chose a restaurant nearby instead. We were by far the only non-Japanese people in the that one and we were really lucky they had a translated menu, as none of them actually spoke any English.That was no problem, however when paying, they wanted us to cover 2 beers we didn’t order (it looked like a honest mistake however, the one that presented us with the bill wasn’t the one that served us, etc. etc.).

That day, after seeing the first one, we started counting how many Japanese women we see who dyed their hair blonde (will subsequently be referred to as Blonde Gal Count), so:

BGC: 1