Japanese Pools

The promise:



The reality:



On the bright side, they make everyone get out of the water for ten minutes every hour, ostensibly to fish out the drowned corpses of crushed children.

Hokkaido More

This is Nonky Land. Nonky Land is like Disney Land, but where the rides get built one per year, but they let people in before anything is finished. It's got a hillside of purple flowers though, I'll give it that. It's hard to drive past.



Some prison we visited. They really tried hard to make it entertaining. There were mock ups with dummies, some were moving. What can I say, it's a prison and designed from the first to be boring and punishing. The only food you could buy for lunch was a prisoner's meal, soup, rice and fish.



This is an artwork and a slide. A brilliant idea, though the slide was really steep and fast. In Sapporo.



Nonky Land again. I kid you not but this was one of only two rides in the 'fun park'. You can see in the background another big draw, a penned in area with some gym balls in it.



This is a perfectly clear shot of Bek and I on a motorboat, skimming across a lake. Why is this photo, taken with one arm on a bumpy boat ride, totally unblurred?

Edo-Tokyo Museum

The other weekend we went out with some friends to Ryogoku and the Edo-Tokyo Museum. Edo is the old name for Tokyo. Most of the museum contained huge reconstructions of Edo era buildings and scale models of the town. From the outside the museum looks like it's hollow.

It's a very impressive looking building on large stilts. It's meant to be a reconstruction of a raised warehouse structure.

This looks like a woodworker's shop. The scenes were very interesting although you couldn't go inside them like you could at the Shitamachi museum in Ueno.

Here is one of the very detailed dioramas. It's so detailed that you can't really see anything in it except a bunch of people.

This one is a little less busy.

Old Japanese phone booths were called white boxes. They look very cool, but so do blue, Tardis-like phone booths.

Alice tries the jinriksha. After the museum we went to a small, secluded garden. It was like the ideal version of a Japanese garden.

Ryogoku is the home of many sumo stables, where young sumoka train to one day fight in the many sumo tournaments each year. Sumo is the national sport of Japan, and it's very entertaining to watch even if you don't know what's going on.

Here we all are at the main sumo stadium. We arrived about ten minutes before closing time, just fast enough to take a look at the small sumo museum.

This was the most interesting photo I saw there. A sumoka playing baseball. I'm sure they do other normal things, it's just hard to visualise those things.

We also visited this temple which doesn't look like a temple. They had a pet cemetary on the side and a lot of cats hanging about. Temples often kept cats to keep the mice from nibbling on the scrolls. These days they are probably kept just to amuse the monks.

We also went to an izakaya, which is like a Japanese pub, the big difference is that they serve a variety of food to snack on as you drink. They have these places in Korea too, it's such a good idea, I wish they had a few in Sydney. It's far less boring to eat and drink, you can drink more, and the food is usually very good yet not everyday fare. I remember eating chicken hearts and lungs on a stick in Korea, here they had tamer options. We ordered a mini pizza, a chees plate, some sultanas, a sausage plate and finally some ice cream for dessert. While there is a lot of food, it's still a pub and drinking is the main idea. We drank beer and I tried some weird Japanese drinks. I can't really remember what they were, strangely enough.

Rainy Day

What to do on a rainy day? Go to one of the huge deparment stores and wreck up the place. Well, the stores don't advise you to do that but it seems to happen anyway due to the massive amount of human traffic walking through them. This was taken in the Seibu store in Ikebukuro.

Tokyo View

Right next to our apartment in Roppongi Hills is the Tokyo View, an art gallery, viewing platform and aquarium all rolled into one. We kept putting off going there but on a cloudy day we decided we had nothing better to do.

The viewing platform is actually better than Tokyo Tower's because it isn't anywhere near as crowded and you don't have to line up very long to go in. Of course you still have to line up, because it's in Japan. They have various cafes and bars too, so you can sit with your drink against the glass and gaze out on Tokyo.

The aquarium was less about education and more about building really weird fishtanks than most I've been to. They had a lot of fluorescent fish and lights, and most of it was in a pitch black room which was difficult to drive a stroller around. They had some furniture which contained fish tanks, like a couch and coffee table. They also had a large fountain-like tank in the middle. I quite liked the shallow open air tank at the entrance. It gave some good reflections of the view.

I suck as a photographer, though, so I didn't get any good shots of these reflections.

The Mori art gallery had a long and boring exhibition about Le Corbusier, some French architect who seemed a little dated. Alice got really unhappy at about this time so maybe I'm judging it too harshly on the whirlwind circuit we made. Oh well, at least it's in character.

Xylophone

At the Children's castle they have a music room where you can just bash the hell out of various percussion instruments. They also have a band that plays kid's songs over and over. Alice clapped them politely at the end of each song.

Marriage

Bek and I will be getting married at the Ward Office this Friday, for visa reasons.

Edit: It's been postponed until next Tuesday, October 2nd.

Namjatown

For my birthday last weekend we decided to try to go out without Alice. We found a babysitter, and she came over a little early to see how Alice would handle her. We've never used a babysitter before apart from our mothers, but Alice didnt' mind at all.

We went to see the Harry Potter movie and afterwards continued on to a Nepalese restaurant that I'd noticed advertised. It was nice to have some alone time as I rarely get away from the baby these days.




The next day we went to Ikebukuro and the Sunshine 60 building. It's one of the tallest buildings in Asia and contains the amazing Namjatown. What's that you ask? Well we barely knew ourselves even after having been there. It could be best described as a food amusement park. It showcases various food stalls along with having pantomime shows and some games of skill. It's divided into various themed 'worlds', and I really wanted to go to the Ikenukuro Gyoza Stadium. Gyoza are Japanese dumplings, and this whole area in the park was based on a stylised Chinese back alley maze of diners. There were a variety of different styles of gyoza on offer but it's so hard to read Japanese characters that I just ended up asking for 'fish' dumplings, or 'vegetable' dumplings. We ate cheese dumplings also, which were a highlight and quite unusual. I tried to use my bad Japanese and asked for some interesting tasting dumplings at one stall, however they just seemed pretty normal when I ate them.





Above you can see one of the characters from Namjatown. The park is actually based on the brand characters from a company whose name escapes me at the moment. Alice seemed quite afraid of this giant cat and not at all happy to be around it. The park had other areas such as a jungle themed area where they had a lot of massage stalls running, with various exotic types of massage on offer like Thai and Hawaiian.

Ice Cream City had an ice cream museum of flavours, and served various styles like rubbery Turkish ice cream and gelato. We ate so much that day. It's really a weird but terrific place.

Rides

Here are some cool ride-on things found in a video game parlour/ gambling den. They're not bolted down, you actually ride them around the games machines.

And another big anime thing that Alice just wouldn't come out of. I think it's Doraemon.