We had planned to go to an aquarium, the national history
museum of Tokyo, shibuya which is the fashion district of Tokyo… and that’s
about it.
The
aquarium was as expected for the most part, since I already went to an aquarium
with my host family only a few weeks ago. The only thing that was really cool about it
over the other aquarium were the squid that I saw. They kind of danced in formation for the
guests. It was really nice to watch and
I thought the squid were interesting creatures.
Oh, there were also a lot of tuna on display. I knew tuna were big fish, but I never really
thought about how thick or.. fat they were.
Other than that though, yeah another aquarium. Not too much to say.
As for
the national history museum, we knew that we needed to walk through a park to
get there and so we did. Except it
turned out that the park was better than the museum, because starting with the
park and ending somewhere in the city of the district we were in were cultural
items that people could visit. We went
against the plan of going to the museum until later in the day, and instead
traveled along the trail finding temples and shrines which we took many
pictures of. It was very beautiful and a
good example of why having a plan could be bad, and exploring might be better.
The
history museum itself was for me a bit boring.
It just went on too long for my attention span. I didn’t start taking pictures until the
later half of the museum, but basically it was a bunch of artifacts like bowls
or documents or weapons and armor. Some
of it was interesting, but things like bowls put me to sleep. Regardless, it was the national history
museum so I am glad I got to see it as it had a nice large collection that I
wouldn’t see in other areas of the country I imagine. I also got some souvenirs at the place.
Oh
yeah, and we went to shibuya, the fashion district. And basically left right away. After seeing akibahara, shibuya was sure
boring. It was like a clean version of
new York city if everything was just clothes and shoes shopping. Much less interesting that akihabara, as
anime and technology are much preferred to clothes.
And you
know, after going to the technology and anime district I was thinking where are
all the movie theaters around here?
There were posters all over the place for a movie adaptation of an anime
series I watched back in 2008 in my florida tech dorm. I thought, hey since I saw this before and I
really enjoyed it, I can watch this movie even without subtitles because I
already know the story. So I invited david
to come watch it with me, even though he had never seen it. He looked up a review and explanation of the
movie online so that he didn’t need to know what was being said either. And then we tried to find a damn movie
theater. And boy that was hard. Not only are there, to my knowledge, 0 movie
theaters in the technology district of Tokyo (is this crazy?), this movie was
only playing at basically 5 theaters in the Tokyo region, despite being advertised
all over the anime district. And most of
these theaters had some kind of restriction or odd way to get in to one or was
too far out of the way. We were lucky to
find just one that we could go to, only an hour before it started and I had to
buy the tickets online, using my Japanese cell phone for confirmation, and then
rush off by train to a place we had never been before.. and then find it from
the train station without a map. We
ended up asking a police man for directions in the local ‘police box’, or very
small police station mainly for asking directions or getting help.
The
movie theater was in a mall just as it would have been in America. And that movie sure was good, and unusually
long for a cartoon movie at 2.5 hours.
It was definitely worth it, we enjoyed it a lot, but it sure was ridiculously
hard to get to a movie theater! Or at
least for the movie we wanted.
Next up
is the last few days of Tokyo leading up to today.
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