Kanazawa "At Home at Ryokan Service"
Summer Holiday in Japan 2009 – Day 8: First day in Tokyo
October 18th, 2009
Finally we arrived in the most populated city in the world: Tokyo.
Here we stayed at the Sutton Place Hotel in Ueno: it is a comfortable hotel with the usual electronic toilet, air conditioning, refrigerator and Internet connection via LAN as we found in the other two hotels and Italian breakfast.
In the morning we were joined at the hotel by 7 people: our free guide and 6 of her friends. All day we visited various places in the city with these people.
As a first step, we walked the streets of the imperial gardens in the center of Tokyo near the Imperial Palace, where he currently resides Japan Emperor.
Obviously, also here there was an impeccable cleanliness and painstaking care of the details of the various elements making up the surrounding environment. The beauty of the places you see in the photos below, even if it would be preferable to see them live.
Then we used the Yurikamome line, an automated train without a driver that brought us artificial island of Odaiba. Odaiba is a place built in the ’90s with futuristic architecture, which becomes extremely crowded on holidays.
There, we were at Miraikan, National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation: in this structure are exposed, for educational purposes, various aspects of modern science and is also used as a place where scientists expose to the public the latest technology innovation.
Depending on the period, items displayed are related to different topics, divided by sector. The official website is an indication of the completeness and seriousness of the structure.
In our case we have focused a bit with the spectacle of Asimo, the robot that talks, walks, runs, carry various objects on command and does many other things.
Below there are two movies that I found on youtube for you to understand the complexity of the robot.
After eating at a restaurant with international cuisine in the same museum, we reached the Shiokaze park where it was built a statue of Gundam in a 1:1 scale. The statue was 18 meters high and impeccably constructed , his head moves and the effect is to have a giant to protect the city … is the ideal completion for the modern artificial island. It’s a pity that at this moment that statue no longer exists since on September 1 began dismantling.
Towards evening we took a stroll on the island from where you have a beautiful view of Tokyo: for example you see all together (see photo), the Tokyo Tower (similar to the Eiffel Tower), a copy of the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Rainbow Bridge (similar to Brooklyn Bridge) that has been used for the header of this site (which should give you the idea of a link between two worlds).
Before dinner we parted from our Japanese travel companions that I thank again for their kindness and helpfulness and, after a quick dinner in an Italian restaurant in the Ueno area, we visited Akihabara at night: do not do that, since in the night in Akihabara there is nothing that look interesting to see. From 9:30pm all main stores are closed.
Also this was a fantastic day that will always remain in our hearts.
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