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Published: January 15th 2011
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The 21st is where I'll start. In the morning we went to Ueno park which was really close to where we were staying, and walked around there for a while. The main draw card of the park is Ueno zoo, but we didn't go into it. The park itself it big enough and quite pretty. After that we went to an area called Ginza where the Sony building was, because Glenn wanted to have a look at all the things they had there and it was pretty interesting, they had like 6 floors of all the different things that Sony sell and we actually spent quite a while there.
That night we went to a district of Tokyo called Akihabara which is the electronic goods district of Japan, and the whole place is full of electronic shops, it was crazy. Shop after shop and they were all pretty busy, I don't think it was all that much cheaper than the things you can buy in Aus, except for in the duty free shops, but you know that if you're looking for something that is in that category you'll find it there. It was unreal.
That night we were going
to the 2005 World Expo in Aichi (back to where Nagoya is). After a long overnight bus trip, which was very uncomfortable, we arrived at the Expo at 8am the next morning, we were extremely tired and that probably wasn't the best way to go into it, especially as it was going to be such a long day.
However the Expo turned out to be pretty good, very busy, in fact the whole day consisted of long line rides, but what we did see was good. We only got to see one of the major Corporate Pavilions, I had wanted to see the Hitatchi one but when we got there and went to reserve a place for later that day the automatic machines weren't working so everyone had to line up and reserve personally, and the line was already 8 hours long!!! Aah, I don't think so! So we decided on the Toyota pavilion and as I was trying to figure out where to go to reserve tickets for that one, a lady walked up to Glenn and gave us two tickets to the Toyota Pavilion, for the 10am show!!! That was unexpected but a nice surprise anyway! No
Robot
One of the robots that were in the Toyota Pavillion long line wait for that one! The pavilion was good, it consisted of a robot show where they made the robots sing and dance and they also showed these cool electronic cars that they have been manufacturing.
After that we spent the day looking at the Country Pavilions, each country puts on their own one, some are just more like shops and sell goods from their country and others are shows. A lot of them had huge long waits, like 3 hours and so we didn't even bother to see those. They were mostly the popular countries like USA, Italy, China etc. We went and saw the Australian one, it was good but not all that impressive, it's whole concept was based on the Platypus and Aboriginal things, but it was good to see anyway. We did see quite a lot though, the African one was really good, it was set up like a real African market or something and you could buy all sorts there. We saw the Shinkansen pavilion too, that is the bullet train. It showcased the Maglev train that Japan has built, it goes over 500km/h !!! Pretty impressive.
We had to make our
own way back to Nagoya station where we were catching another overnight bus back to Tokyo by 10.30 that night and we were told to expect long waits and that it takes about an hour to get back by train to the station from the Expo so we left around 9.00pm and the lines to get out of there were already long, but we were lucky we left when we did cos it took us close to 2 hours to get back to the station to get our bus. We were standing in line outside the Expo waiting for the train for over an hour, it was testing I tell you that much!!! And then again the bus trip back was uncomfortable.
The morning of the 23rd we arrived back in Tokyo at 5.30am and as we couldn't check in to our accommodation yet we decided to go the Tokyo Fish markets, which start around that time and are supposed to be pretty cool to see, so we headed out that way, but as we were getting off the train at the station we saw two other foreigners who said if we were going to the fish markets not
to bother because they were closed, it was a public holiday! Japan has so many public holidays that it is hard to keep up!
That night I introduced Glenn to Okonomiyaki, the pancake like dinner that I have come to love! He really liked it too so that was good, and the place where we went had hot plates in the middle of the table so we could cook it ourselves. What is great about Okonomiyaki is that you can choose whatever you want to put in it yourself...needless to say Glenn's was minus seafood!
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