Days 131-132: 3/28-29/24 - Mt Fuji through the clouds, exploring Tokyo!
3/28
Our visit to see Mount Fuji was gray and rainy, and Fuji-sighting-less, but a fun day trip. Our morning began with a hectic train ride to Shinjuku station (a morning commuter saw our difficulty with train selection and helped us along our route to make sure the station we changed trains at had sufficient rain cover for us!). Shinjuku station itself has over 60 entries and exits, and making sure we found the appropriate one was a lot in the morning rush at the busiest station in the world (3.6 million average passengers per day in 2018!). Despite being herded by the tour company workers aggressively, we were not close to the last arrivals and thus began our tour in earnest.
Because of the weather we weren’t going to be seeing much of Mount Fuji, so we stopped at a Fuji visitor’s center to learn about the mountain. Afterwards we took a ferry on a lake and a cable car up a mountain for some views before taking the bullet train back to Yokohama. Fully spent from our day, we indulged in what would become semiregular for us in Japan: grocery store dinners.
(quiet) chaos on the morning train into Shinjuku station!
Please accept this photo in lieu of an actual photo of Mount Fuji!
A nearly freezing day!
A gate on Lake Kawaguchiko
We were fogged in, but it didn't stop us enjoying our chilly visit
The tour company provided us with individual hot pot for our lunch; we also enjoyed a drum demonstration.
3/29
Kaia’s 31st birthday! After the exemplary breakfast buffet, we took the train into the Daimaru department store and wandered through the imperial palace garden walk (again, with far fewer cherry blossoms that originally expected due to the cold Spring!). A bus out towards the water brought us to teamLabs, an experiential museum that Paul had found for Kaia. They also had vegan ice cream, donuts, and ramen out front! Ice cream and donuts beforehand prepared us for a unique experience. Sets of rooms that varied from pillow covered, to mirrored with hanging lights, to full of live orchids on ropes that moved as you approached them entertained us for the better part of the afternoon. Vegan ramen afterwards.
In the evening we headed to the Roppongi neighborhood and went up one of the towers with a 360 observation floor. The views, accompanied with awed wikipedia searches about the scale of Tokyo, cemented how enormous the city was. After a train home, sushi boxes in the room for a birthday dinner.
"Generation Gap" (Paul taking a photo with a phone, Kaia taking a photo with her glasses)
(Nishinomaru gate)
Havin' a blast!
Tokyo Imperial Palace
Here is a selection of photos from almost every room in the teamLab Planets digital art museum:
Live orchids suspended in a completely mirror covered room was definitely a highlight.
A surprising number of these rooms involved getting our feet/calves wet
Close readers may remember the Louise Bourgeois exhibition we attended in Sydney just weeks ago!
Kaia enjoying one of the many views from the observation deck in the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower on her 31st birthday!
Best year yet!