Ahh… Where are we again?

On February 21st Anne and I went to a man made island on the south west side of Tokyo call Odaiba. The island was originally built for military purposes in the 1800s, but was changed to a commercial area in the 1990s. We took the Yurikamome (it’s an un-manned elevated train) to the island and got off at the second stop. What we didn’t realize is that the Yurikamome apparently is really really fast as we discovered that we were now on Ellis Island in New York. Well, that was what we thought from looking at the Statue of Liberty. As it turns out we were still in Tokyo. We were only looking at a replica of the Statue of Liberty called the Goddess of Liberty. Behind the statue is the Rainbow Bridge. It does not look like much of a rainbow during the day, but at night the solar powered LED lights come on to complete the look.

Odaiba Island is also home to some very odd looking buildings. One of them is the Fuji TV Building. This building reminded me of a building you might see in an 80s sci-fi movie (Robocop comes to mind for some reason). The Island also has a 7 story shopping mall (of sorts) called the Decks. It has the video game themed park "Sega Joypolis" as well as "Daiba Little Hong Kong". Since I usually can’t pass up a video game Anne was nice enough to indulge the kid in me. Joypolis is a 3 story gaming and theme ride adventure land. We enjoyed a car racing game (in a full size car). We walked by a game show, US TV themed rides, snow board like half pike rides, and much more. We enjoyed lunch at a Chinese-go-round restaurant in Little Hong Kong. The restaurant was like a sushi-go-round, but with Chinese food. If you are not familiar with the sushi-go-round style it is a restaurant were dishes are put on a conveyor belt and you take what you want off the belt as it comes near you. Each plate is color coordinated with a dollar amount. At the end of your meal the waiter/tress adds up the total amount of your plates to tally up your tab.

We then went to Italy. Well, once again these clever Japanese designers fooled us. We actually went to Venus Fort in Palette Town (which contrary to the name, does not actually have any palettes). It is an indoor shopping mall made to look like an 18th century South European town (like the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas or Macau). It looked gorgeous!

Part of Palette Town, but opposite of the Venus Fort was Mega Web. Which strangely enough did not have giant spiders or the Internet. It was a Toyota showroom. We did not stay there long, but we decided that we would have to come back in the future. We did enjoy looking at the cool futuristic models though.

The last part of Palette Town we saw was the ferris wheel. It is 115 meters (377 feet) tall and is one of the worlds largest. It is one of the 3 ferris wheels visible from our apartment (you have to squint to see the other two).