Exploring Tokyo

I got the right tickets!
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We checked the weather forecast, and decided that the first of our two full days in Tokyo would be our around-town day, and then the second day, which looked much nicer weather-wise would be our Disney Sea day. There's a big new building under construction just next to our hotel, and Max just loved to watch the two cranes at work, lifting stuff way up top. We would just turn one of the chairs facing the window, and he would sit there transfixed while we got ready in the morning. Almost as good as Treehouse!

Our babysitter, the crane
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The plan for our day started at the Transportation Museum, on the other side of Tokyo, but a fairly easy subway ride away. Once we arrived at the subway station, we scanned the map to get our bearings, and a lady told us that the museum had closed. She tried to tell us how to get to the new one, but her English wasn't good enough to fully explain, so we decided to go have a look for ourselves, thinking maybe she was thinking of a different museum, since our brand new Lonely Planet as well as Fodor's and LP's web site all listed this place as a popular attraction. So, after a bit of walking about, we found the building and it had indeed closed, almost two years ago! Needless to say, we were pretty peeved at once again being led astray by Lonely Planet. The new location is 30km outside of Tokyo, which is what the lady was trying to explain to us, but this was not in our plan for the day. Fortunately, there was other things to do in the neighborhood, since the electronics district of Akihabara was only a block away, so off we headed to see the gizmos. This place is indeed an electronics geek's heaven. In general, Japanese seem to be geekier than we're used to, and far far less self conscious about it. There were lots of video game places (most quite busy for a Wednesday afternoon) filled, yes, with mostly men, but there were some women in evidence. The funniest thing were the men in business suits playing these video games in the middle of the day - don't they have to be at work? Daniel was really hoping to play robot soccer like we saw on the Amazing Race (it was in Osaka, not Tokyo, but we were hoping...), but we didn't see it anywhere. Maybe if we knew where to look, they'd have something like that somewhere!

one whole floor devoted to Hello Kitty

Super-thin TV
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There was the whole range of electronics shops, from tiny little stalls selling resistors and switches, to giant 6-storey electronics mega-stores. It led us to wonder how the little stalls selling just thermostats, or just resistors & diodes stay in business - kind of like a flea market I guess, but I'm not sure who shops there... We checked out one mega-store from top to bottom, hoping to see some cool, ground-breaking stuff, but we were mildly disappointed to see mostly the same things you can get at Future Shop, but at nearly twice the price! They did have a couple cool things though - one was the new Sony OLED television, which is only 1/8" thick. It's a very nice picture too; apparently this is the future of TVs. It's about $2000 for about a 10" screen, but then DVD players were $1000 too when they were brand new, and now you can get one for $20. The other cool thing was the mini-laptops. They have anywhere from 7-10" screens, and run a regular operating system. There's at least one for sale in Canada by Asus for only $400, that has built-in wireless and webcam and the whole deal. No hard drive though, only flash memory, so they're way faster to boot up and the batteries last longer. Pretty cool stuff for travelers, whether business or pleasure, since these things are so small and light they can be stuffed in any bag, yet they can do pretty much anything a full-size computer can do.

Hmm...
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We had lunch at the Japanese version of Denny's, called Curry Hut or something like that. We went in & sat down thinking it was just a hole-in-the-wall type place, but then they came out with a bib, colouring book, bowl, sippy cup and all this stuff for Max, and we're like 'wow', it's just like Lenny's! Tonya played it safe with an eggplant curry, but Daniel decided to try something Japanese and went with the natto, which is fermented soy beans. Well, it sounds gross and it is gross. It looked like something from the movie Alien (like the hatchery where everything is stuck together with this stringy goo) and tasted like it was rotting. Oh well. better luck next time, right? Max decided to be a king-sized brat, so we gobbled our food and high-tailed it out of there.

Romantic sushi dinner
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Our next stop was the Sony building in Ginza, where they had four stories of showrooms with all their latest gear. Some neat HD camcorders, again the OLED TV and mini-laptops, but nothing too compelling. If we could read the product descriptions in Japanese, maybe it would have been a little more interesting, as there wasn't much English around. So, as we are standing in the lobby, planning our next move, bratty Max starts to throw a fit in his stroller, and pukes all over the floor of this gleaming lobby of the Sony building. I think everyone was pretty grossed out, since no-one really offered to help us. So what do you do? You just wipe it up as best you can and head on to the next destination.

On to KiddyLand, a six-story (plus the basement) cornucopia of toys (with one whole floor devoted to Hello Kitty, of course). Max was in heaven here! There were whole racks of scary monsters for him to 'rawr' at. The Japanese really know how to do monsters - they did invent Godzilla after all! Toy trains, cars and trucks. Woody & Buzz! A nice LEGO section for Daniel to dream about too. And busy! We couldn't believe how busy the place was on a cold rainy Wednesday. Hoping against hope, we of course tried to find a restaurant using Lonely Planet, only to find, of course, that it no longer existed...

We did find a neighborhood in Shibuya though that had lots of narrow criss-crossing alleys, lined with very hip shops. Had it not been cold, late and raining, we would have lingered a little longer to check it out. The quickest way home was on the JR (Japan Railways), which is different than the subway. The JR is a little less English-friendly and has nothing but Japanese characters on the route maps. We managed to match up the symbols and find our home station of Shinjuku though - a satisfying feat indeed!

Once home, we realized that our dream of room service was not going to come true since almost everything on the menu was very meaty, and the Japanese selections were astronomically priced. We would have easily spent $100 just for sushi or udon. So, Daniel headed off to the AM/PM to see what he could find. He returned triumphant with plenty of sushi, complete with dessert and beer for only $32. So, we had our 'nice Japanese meal' at the table in our hotel room, while Max slept in his cot.