Friday, January 9, 2009

Odaiba - New Tokyo

Monday morning, Mike had Japanese class, so Joe and I headed out on our own. We hit up Tocho - the Tokyo Municipal Building, or something like that. It has a free observation deck about 45 stories up, so you get a real clear view of Tokyo. WOW, there's a lot of people here! It's such a busy city, I really don't think I could survive the lifestyle there. Well anyways, we went up there and looked around some, as you can see.

Then we went to Excelsior Caffe, at Joe's request. He had a coffee and a sandwich, and I enjoyed a maple latte. Mmmmm, it was good! Eventually we met up with Mike, and would you believe it? Two hours of Japanese class and he was speaking like a native! (I wouldn't believe it if I were you.) Well, we went down to Odaiba, which is a waterfront area, quite newly developed. We had a simple lunch, and then went to the Tokyo Future Museum (?) to check out what all the fuss was. There was this robot called Asimo. I took an 8-minute video of the presentation, and would love to post it here, but that will have to wait for another day. It was cool, though! There was so much to see in that museum, I could have easily spent two days just looking and learning. But we needed to move on, and so we did.

We then went to the mall area, and... what's this? When did Lady Liberty move to Tokyo? Answer: it didn't. But Tokyo's got its own statue, probably not as big as the American one (when do the Japanese ever do anything 'bigger' than the States?) but otherwise quite the same. Interesting, eh?

As we walked around, we came across the Toyota Car Exhibition, at which they put on display their latest vehicles, and had cool driving simulation games and reflex-testers. Check the next post - the future is now!!!


Finally, we had dinner at a cool Hawaiian burger joint. Aleke Kaueke? No, I forget the name. It sounded Hawaiian, though.

And is that where the night ended? Of course not! Joe and I moved on to our next location, and said farewell to Mike. I'll post about the next location, too... anyways, at our next location, we met up with an old pal of mine... the man that became synonymous with me. In fact, the students at Okisho started to call us by one name: Torebaaron. Yep, Aaron "Touss" Toussaint! He's doing his master's degree at Sophia University, but had time for a little Starbucks action with Joe and I! Good times!

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