Odaiba & Roppongi

So we woke up one morning to see our travel friends off (they were going back to Vancouver) and after they left we decided we'd go to Odaiba. It was on our list but we hadn't planned to go that day so it was rather impulsive. We walked up to Asakusa station and purchased tickets for a little ferry ride down the river (under 12 bridges) to the man-made island of Odaiba. I got to take some awesome shots of the Rainbow Bridge as we approached. For those who don't know this, Tokyo Big Sight (home of Comiket) is situated on Odaiba.

First order of business was to see a bit of a car showroom where you could test drive vehicles on a little indoor track. We quickly gravitated towards an arcade, however, and spent an hour there playing Project Diva, Beatmania, and Jubeat. After we were out of coins we wandered into a mall (we didn't even know this place was a mall). It was GORGEOUS:

I think this picture best does it justice. It was mostly clothing stores and such but it was nice to walk around in. It had a nice fountain in the middle we stopped to take pictures at and such. For dinner we had Italian food and decided it was time to head back to the mainland and check out Roppongi by night fall. We had the opportunity to take a train to a connecting line we wanted which ran across the famous Rainbow Bridge. It was great to ride across it after seeing it from the ferry.

Now I'd been to Roppongi before (and Roppongi Hills twice before) and decided it was nothing special. I thought, "I'll take Sabrina here, we'll see the spider, look at over-priced clothes, go home" - but it turned out to be so much better than that!

Sabrina really wanted to go to an art museum she saw on one of the signs so we decided to check that out. After an expensive meal over-looking the Tokyo Tower at night (hey, we had to do it once this trip), we found ourselves buying multi-passes for the observatory, the Mori Art Museum, and the dinosaur exhibit on the 52nd-53rd floor of Roppongi Hills. Our first stop was the dinosaurs (which had so much more than expected) where I saw quite a lot of castings of dino skeletons, full-scale life-like statues of the dino's, and quite a few real fossils as well.

Next up is the Mori Art Museum. I didn't expect anything really...maybe paintings or something. Turns out it was all full-on installations; as a media arts student this is right up my alley. First up was Tokujin Yoshiaka's contributions (hey I learned about him in class!): He had the world's largest piece of optical glass on display as well as this thing:

There were quite a few other notable installations as well but I think you're best off checking out what's available online. Looking over at the view of Tokyo at night was a great end to the day.