Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 111

The last day of our Valentines Day trip to Tokyo. This will be a SHORT blog, since we only did a couple things before heading to the airport.

We started with breakfast and decided on a tiny little noodle place for Soba noodles. This was another place where, if you look at the right-side of the first picture, you buy a ticket in a vending machine and then give that to the people inside. We picked two different types of Soba (basically by picture only). The soba noodles definitely have a different flavor than ramen noodles.

We left the hotel and just did a walk down through a few areas of Tokyo that we hadn't really walked through before. We took just a few random photos of the area.

At the Theatre d'Automne (Autumn Theater), you can see that they seem to do a set of western shows, including The Lion King and Mama Mia.

Around the corner was the Takeshiba Pier, which has ferry service to a couple of islands, as well as shops and restaurants. There is also an open area with this old ship mast (no ship attached) stuck in the middle.

We caught a monorail back to an area called the Shiodome Sio-Site, which has a set of skyscrapers with businesses, hotels, and restaurants. The area reminded me a bit of La Defense on the outskirts of Paris, where you have multiple skyscrapers all linked with elevated walkways. At the NTV Headquarters, there is a glockenspiel with mechanical animals. The steam-punk themed clock was defined by Hayao Miyazaki and is the largest animated clock in the world. It took four years to design and was completed December 2006. It is 12 meters high and 18 meters wide. The animations include a firing steam cannon, moving figures, and moving legs. We didn't get there at the right time to see the animations going, but if you are interested, there are a couple YouTube videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFySOiuvsDo).

The area has some really cool things, like these seats.

And back up through Gina, we came across this store, established in 1869, which looks like an old ski chalet stuck in between two high-rise buildings.

And then ... back to the airport and home. We packed SO much into our weekend get-away!