As anticipated, falling asleep at 7:30 the night before led to some very weird wake up patterns. I was up at 2:30am and only succeeded at fits of sleep after that. Jordan was up around 4 or so, which meant we were all up. A lot of “behavioural coaching” for Jordan that we were in a hotel and she could not stomp or raise her voice. Crappy sleep made her rather cranky, though this would get better throughout the day.
We went to the Senso-ji temple first thing in the morning to beat the crowd. Coming back towards the hotel, the market street began to open, so we were able to take our time and explore the stalls on the way back. As we left the temple, a old Japanese man grabbed my hand to ask where I was from. He said he wanted to practice his English. Anywhere else, this would be a scam to have his buddy pickpocket you, but he was a genuinely nice guy. He named all the provinces of Canada and even tried a bit of French.
We had planned to meet up with Mai, a friend from high school in Brussels, for lunch. We stopped at a playground on the way, which was a lovely break in the sun. Don Quixote is a department store that appears like it should be cheap, but it was more expensive for most of the things we saw compared to other shops we visited. Emily needed some new sunglasses though, so we got some; unfortunately, the signage on the rack was confusing and Emily ended up getting more expensive glasses than anticipated.
Sushi at Jura Sushi Flagship was great. It is a conveyor belt restaurant, where you can pick up plates as the go by. But you can also order different kinds from the tablet. Jordan was very big about picking stuff off the lower belt, so we ended up with a few unnecessary plates. The table had a built in hot water dispenser for tea and a slot to replace the plates. Every five plates you returned, a little video played on the tablet and triggered a possible prize from the Gacha Machine; We only won once in our 7 attempts, but it certainly added a bit of excitement to the proceedings and served its psychological purpose of getting us to get one more plate when we were otherwise finished so that we could trigger another attempt. We ate to our hearts content (35 plates of sushi!) and it was great to catch up with Mai. Quality was great, even though Kura is known as a lower end chain. The price was 5300 Yen for all of us so very cheap.
From there, it was back to the hotel for some quick rest, where Jordan once again refused to be still and quiet. But then it was a train and bus to go to TeamLabs Planets. That place was actually crazy. Totally immersive art installation. In the first portion, we had to take our shoes off and wear shorts as we would walk through water, which happened in two of the pieces. Much of the art was happening from projectors and the plaques said it was not pre-programmed, but was responding to people in the environment and therefore each formation was unique to your experience and would never be experienced again.
Probably craziest was the mirror and light string room. And you could control the colour for everyone with an app. Another was water up to your knees where projectors had virtual Koi swimming around and reacting to where people were. Another projector based one was the constant flow of leaves through the seasons projected on go a black dome where you lay down to see it. Getting up was an attack on balance. Almost as much as the black hole and forest sections, which had very squishy and wonky sloped floors. The “catch and release” was probably the worst given the bad implementation of the app that was not very responsive for the capturing portion.
Got some great ramen on the way back to the hotel. Jordan didn’t want to eat it though. Could have used more of the delicious duck meat, but the broth and noodles were top notch. We ran in to a group of people doing real-life Mario Kart in the Tokyo streets, but no sign of any green or red shells Emily and I managed to stay up later that night, so hopefully setting up for a better lie in (which worked!).
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