Firstly, a huge apology. I haven’t updated in a long time because I’ve been really busy. I know that’s no excuse, and to make up for it I have lots of updates ready to go. This first one is about my recent visit to Odaiba, a large artificial island in Tokyo Bay. To get there, you must travel over the Rainbow Bridge by rail. As I was inside a train I couldn’t take any photos of the bridge, but here is the best one I could find of the bridge by day;

and by night;

Don’t worry, Japan have not stolen the Statue of Liberty. For some reason there’s a replica of it in Odaiba. I don’t know why but I think it’s to promote international cultural interest or something. It’s not working, as when I told one of my students at the school that the statue in Odaiba is based on a statue from America, they immediately told me that I was infact wrong and that the Americans had stolen the idea for the statue. Those crazy Americans!

Anyway, I was joining one of the teachers from the school and his daughter on a trip to the huge Panasonic centre and science museum. From the moment I got there I knew this was serious business when I spotted this in the middle of the room;

You can’t really appreciate how big this thing is from the photo. It’s about the same height as I am lengthways (~6″2), and the image quality was razor sharp. The rest of the floor was covered in various Panasonic products, including home entertainment systems that clocked in at up to £8,000 ($16,000/¥1,800,000), mobile phones thinner than Calista Flockhart and plenty of other very expensive things I could write terrible analogies about. One company who got a lot of floor space were Nintendo, who never miss a change to spread their influcence to another generation of their motherland;

I didn’t get any photos of the science museum itself because they didn’t allow flash photography and the room it was held in was pitch black. The museum itself was amazingly clever though - everything you do is fed back to a little control you carry round with you. Based on the order you do the activities, as well as the speed and success, a little computer character grows on your screen. Mine was purple and blue and spinny and that can only be a good thing.

The other fun thing we did in Odaiba was go on the huge wheel. It’s not as big as the London eye, but it does boast heated seats and really small cabins for that “I’m going to die and I won’t even have room to walk around when I do” feeling. I hope I can go again during the day so I can get some arial Tokyo shots. For now though, this photo will have to do.

Well, that’s all for my trip to Odaiba. I know this update was a little boring but I’m getting back into the swing of things after my haitus. Bear with me! :)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 5:17 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.