I think I found where yesterdays transportor takes you – I passed a station called ‘Tokyo Teleport’, which would seem like a logical place for it to go. I didn’t bother getting off though, ‘cos I knew what was on the other end already.
Lovely day in the park instead, well, after a quick stop off in some industrial wasteland – this place in incredible, there seems to be stations everywhere – most of them are connected to something, but this one, at the end of the Rinkai line, is just there all on its own surrounded by grim industry and gangs of teenage kids hanging out at the Subway sandwich shop. No lunch for me here, too many multitudes in the eateries (even the middle of nowhere stations have five or six incomprehensible cafes and for some inexplicable reason they’re all full on sunday). Back onto the train.
Instead I arrived early at the park grabbed some lunch before meeting Nobue-san (should I use -chan here? Anyone know what the difference is?) again. A quick wander around revealed that the park was really rather full of people, its a bank holiday tomorrow so everyone was relaxing in big queues for all the food places in the park. I spent ages getting fries with cheese dip from a local fast food place as it had a faster moving queue than anywhere else I found. Cheese dip was what I ordered, but it turns out that someones found a way of producing Kraft cheese flavour slices in a liquid form.
The building melds a fast food restaurant and a game arcade into a single almost seamless unit, complete with a dog walking game (where you’re walking some of the campest looking dogs I’ve ever seen by pulling on a lead on a treadmill) and a variant of the 2p cascade games with a model rollercoaster in the middle. It was all squished into the space underneath the railway tracks. One day I’ll stop being amazed by the architecture of the infrastructure, but that day is, I fear, some time in the future.
We walked down to one of the strangest buildings I’ve ever seen, a long thin glass building with a lift and stairs on one side of an archway over the path, and a ramp leading down on the other. Its perhaps 200m long, 12m wide, and two stories tall, glass on all sides – so the airconditioning bill must be monstrous. Still, at least the view is good, which I guess is why its there. Looking out over the ever-shrinking bay area N-san pointed out a number of landmarks, she lives nearby so knows the place quite well. It was also my first glimpse of Cinderellas castle in Disneyland – I have to go there one day, but I doubt I’ll like it.
Today was not a good day to pick to go to the aquarium. It was full of people. It was full of children. There were a couple of tanks of uglyfish that didn’t have much of a queue around them, so we spent most of the tour looking at them. There were occasional sightings of beautiful colourful fish flitting about in their tanks and the tuna theatre was quite impressive. I felt sorry for the penguins outside, I was having trouble with the heat and I’m sure antarctic dwellers would have had more of a problem.
The architecture of the place was wonderful, although the construction of the building was dull concrete there were some great spaces within, and the design of the place as a whole struck me as reminiscent of our castles, with a drawbridge entrance across a moat surrounding the circular central keep. Except that the moat was actually the top of the tuna theatre.
We looped back around through the park to the omnipresent sound of lost child announcements – howcome the Japanese can make a soundsystem perfectly comprehensible throughout an entire park while we have trouble making a simple station announcement comprehensible anywhere on the platform?
After a little detour to play with some stray cats – there seemed to be a lot, and they must be strays since there isn’t housing nearby, they were reasonably friendly for feral cats, obviously used to having people in their park – we took our slush puppies onto the beach, an island that appeared to have been specially constructed to be a beach. Where the sand is a darker colour than I’m used to, must be all the volcanoes there are here.
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