A bridge walk to Tokyo beach at Odaiba

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Tokyo is full of people and has extremely busy spots. We rented an apartment in Nishi-Shinjuku just 10 minutes walk to Shinjuku station. This station is a maze of underground shops, several department shops, open terraces, highway bus stations and of course many train lines. It is the busiest train station with around 1.6 million people passing by per day. Germany’s busiest station is the new central station in Berlin with around 30000 people per day. But Tokyo has surprisingly quiet areas with narrow lanes perfect to ride bicycle. One of this leisurable spots is Tokyo beach on Odaiba with a bay view towards Tokyo tower. We decided to walk to Odaiba using the land mark rainbow bridge. It takes 30 minutes to cross with the highest point being 53 meters over the sea. The view was brilliant with Tokyo down town to the North and Yokohama to the South. We relaxed on one of the artificial islands and I spent some time to squeeze Japanese words into my head. I had started a three week Japanese intense course and constantly mixed the vocabulary.
Tokyo beach was busy with a football team training their muscles and team spirit, dotted tents with couples and the dog owners with their home pet. The surfers were rare since November is considered as cold and not suitable for swimming. Though someone could argue this with air temperatures at 15-20C and water temperatures around 20 C. Behind the beach are some shopping malls with "The deck" offering a pleasant promenade walk on wooden planks. There is even a statue of liberty as a picture taking bay view spot. We wandered along the area towards the museum of innovation. The museum displays leading edge technologies in a similar style as the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Demonstrations of technical effects as supra conductivity are scheduled and the latest achievement of robot research is presented. Most famous is Asimo, a humanoid robot developed by Honda Corporation who was unfortunately in maintenance holidays. Most important all displays and information are bilingual Japanese/English.

Practicalities:
Bridge walk free
Innovation museum 500 Yen
Exchange: 1 Euro = 120 Yen

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