Japan Day 2 - My Feet Hurt

Shout out to Hoka.

Remember when I was 20 and I walked everywhere in My OluKai flip flops? Like 30k steps a day in France and all over Thailand? Can anyone else tell I'm 30 now? I'm wearing brand new Hoka Bondi 9's and my feet are still sore even though they're like walking on a cloud. We walked 30k steps yesterday and 25k today. I should keep a step counter, so 55k so far this trip. Anyway my feet are so sore.

Today we got up and got our daily breakfast of onigiri and a pastry from 7-11. This time I got fish onigiri and an apple custard pastry. We ate them by the side of the road like homeless tourist miscreants but luckily only a few people had to pass us by and witness our delinquency.

We then proceeded to walk all the way from Yotsuya Station to the Imperial Palace. Its something I managed not to see when I was here the last time and actually I didn't see it this time because I didn't realize it was outside of the Imperial Palace East National Gardens and so we really only saw the east gardens. Yes I feel silly, no we will not be going back tomorrow, maybe we will see it on our last day in Tokyo when we come back right before our flight but its a hard maybe because I'm more interested in going back to the kitchen shopping street.

Its like 5pm here right now and we saw the palace at 9am and that legitimately feels like days ago at this point.

The gardens were nice, very imperial, but not botanical so less interesting to us than had originally thought they might be. We then left and headed to the outer Tsujiki fish market which was so wildly overpacked with tourists that I was immediately overwhelmed and uninterested. We opted for a take away sushi a few blocks down that saved us probably close to 4,000 yen or more and was also probably the exact same fish as what was found in the market. Also all the patrons were Japanese which is always a nice sign.

We then took a bus down to TeamLab and it was an interesting experience. It really is a cool immersive art exhibit type thing but I don't know its maybe something doing once in your life ever and not necessarily more than that. There were three main parts including Garden, Forest, Water and then Open Air but that was just a small courtyard with a cafe. Garden was that hanging flowers in a mirror room and that was cool but maybe not as cool as the hype suggests? It was a pretty visual but I was mostly impressed by them growing a ton of air borne hibiscus flowers. Then forest was this wildly psychedelic fever dream of an area. It had a couple of cool features and a few activities like walking on a few small stepping stones over projected rainbow water, and then there was one where you jumped along a trampoline and the projection rippled the universe around you. The whole thing was based on these incredibly detailed and 3D looking projections all over the place. Some were more interactive than others and the whole place was like a super high tech rainbow bright lights acid/field trip. For me personally it also was a wild distortion of where is the floor and where is the wall and is the room moving and I got a little sea sick/motion sick in there and writing this now around 7 hours later I'm still getting that like after you've been on a boat sensation of the world moving in your head even though it isn't in real life.

The last section was water and it was by far the coolest. It included walking through water and the entire thing was barefoot. You first walked up an incline with water running down it which felt like simulating walking up a river, there was also an area of knee high opaque water onto which fish were projected and the fish would interact with you. The room somehow tracked where you were and the fish would walk with you, turn into flowers when they hit you, etc. The best thing though was this room with hanging lights that would light up in a pattern and made it look like the universe? The floor, ceilings, and wall were mirror so it looked infinite. I'm shamelessly stealing the website's picture because I can't describe it accurately enough. The room was large enough for you not to be able to distinguish where the room ended and where the mirror started so it did look and feel like you were in an infinite universe. (TeamLab, sorry for stealing your image, I just can't put it in words. Please don't sue).

So imagine that but every single dot is its own light and they can change color and they all blink on and off to some master design that makes them look like a billion universes, or a rainbow of exploding fireworks etc. They were a humongous 3D grid of light up dots in a large mirrored box and we just got to watch them perform. Hands down this was the best part of the entire place.

I would say that TeamLab was cool but I personally think it was a little bit short/crowded/underwhelming for the amount of hype it gets.

We left TeamLab and stopped back at Tsujiki fish market for an actual go round now that we had time. We ended up getting milkshakes and mochi and agreeing that this place had more or less become a tourist trap. I'm not saying its not cool or didn't have historic origins but its just become a tourist market at this point. Especially with the inner market closing down in 2018. I think there's this incredible cycle of places being quality, becoming recognized, getting overly recognized and flocked to, and then subsequently becoming uncool as it becomes more and more monetized and industrialized to meet demand. Or in the case of things like the 10,000 Torii gates becoming overwhelmed because there is no alternative and there is no expanding.

Anyway we ended the day over at Shibuya just so that Sam could see the legendary Shibuya crossing. That was a check it off the list location and we opted for an early night back at the airbnb after that where I've been writing and we packed for our travel to Osaka tomorrow.

Tomorrow we hit the ground running with the Shinkansen at 9am to Osaka. We will spend the day in Osaka, the next day in Kyoto, and the third day in Nara before heading down to the Shimanami Kaido portion of our trip.

For dinner, we went to this Tonkatsu place thats near by to our airbnb and semi-well renowned. I'm going to link to this guy's post because he goes into more detail and gives more information than I care to at this late hour and because everything was exactly the same, we even had the same dude and I'm going to guess his mom (based on the mothers day flowers in the corner) who served us. I will add though that I love all the small spaces in Japan and this place was no exception. It probably had 8 seats in the whole place and instead of high bar seats like in the US they're all low and the stools are short enough that in my 2" Hokas I could touch the ground. Have I told you how much I hate the average seat height in America? I'm going to come back and build myself a little portable collapsible folding foot rest because my knee can't take it.

https://tastetokyo.blogspot.com/2017/05/suzushin-tonkatsu.html

PS. I just took a quick look at some of my previous posts and ran across Bus Ride from Hell and Snoring Man and for the life of me I can't remember that at all. I skimmed a paragraph or two and I can't remember the event or writing about it. I'm going to reread the entire thing some time lol, I'm starting to really see the value of writing everything down the day it happens.