Tokyo

So much to say, so little time.

We went into Tokyo today. My day began at 6:00 when I woke up to my alarm clock and had my usual breakfast. Cheese, ham, tomatoes, yogurt, toast. Then we left for the train station. It was super crowded due to rush hour but we are far enough away from Tokyo that the rush didn't hit until after we were on the train. It's like getting on the L up at Linden. Something I noticed about Japanese trains; they're faster, more efficient, cleaner, safer, and quieter but also way more expensive. Also interesting, museum fees are way way cheaper. It was only 200 yen for me and the boys and 500 yen for my host parents to get into the science museum. That’s $2.00 and $5.00 for a top notch museum.

It was a super cool museum, very hands on. It reminded me a lot of the the science and industry museum except smaller. It was a big museum but it’s hard to compete with the size of Chicago museums. There were several attractions. First we went to a famous planetarium. They had an English translation headpiece so I got English in one ear and Japanese in the other. It was disorienting at first but after a while I got used to it. It was a cool presentation about the miraculous set of circumstances that allowed Earth to produce life, and just how unlikely that was. Next we toured the exhibits. The first one was about space and the Japanese space program. All the information was in Japanese and English, making the museum much more enjoyable. The next exhibit was about genetics and the human influence on them. Also very cool.

The next two exhibits were on the floor below, which was connected by a long oval bridge with a large open space four stories high in the middle. Suspended in gap was a large sphere with a rotating projection of Earth. The next two exhibits were about superconductors and robotics. They had some very cool presentations including a 15 minutes long experiment with superconductors at low temperatures. They used a lot of liquid nitrogen. They had a working model of the maglev, a magnetic powered train, and a demonstration of Asimo, a super duper cool robot. We had lunch at the museum consisting of store bought onigiri (rice balls).

Then we hiked over to the Telecom center where we thought there was a free viewing platform. Turns out not but it was cool anyway. This building is shaped like a large rectangular doughnut, with a hole in the middle. It was pretty neat. Then we took a local train over to a shopping center on Tokyo bay. From there you could see the rainbow bridge and a mock Statue of Liberty. I’ve never been to New York so having my picture taken with the Statue of Liberty for the first time, in Tokyo was surreal. We walked around the shopping center for a while looking for the Sony science museum. There we found a cheap entrance fee again, and proceeded to another planetarium. I liked this one about the same because despite the lack of an English translation, it was a cooler presentation, about comets this time. Then we walked through an optical illusion exhibit where I snapped a few pictures before they told me it was forbidden. The illusions were all physical. The first about alternation hot and cold pipes. It was a section of pipe made by wrapping two copper pipes around each other, like two slinkies intertwining in opposite directions. One pipe was filled with hot water and one with cold. On their own they felt fine but when bother the hot and cold were felt at the same time it felt like burning. There were some more physical illusions. My favorite was a board with vertical stripes. You could get real close to it and try to balance on one foot while someone else shook the board. It was impossible to stay balanced.

Then we walked across the building to the second part of the Sony Museum. In there were tons of physical play tools. A bunch or research engineers were given tasks to create fun toys out of everyday items and computers. There was one display that created fireworks when something touched it, a hand, a bubble. There were others that distorted appearances, one that showed humans moving only as dots on a screen. The dots were human joints and you had to guess what they were doing. There were some experiments into virtual reality and eyesight. Quite an museum.

After that we took a series of trains back to Tsuchiura, had some sort of shredded beef for dinner that was really good, and returned home. Today I go to my school to do orientation and learn all of the intricate and complicated rules, of which I’m sure there are many.