Hey Hive/Steemit!
If you didn't catch the last couple of posts, this series is about our trip to Tokyo (again) way back in August 2016, when we went there for a short international exchange program called Promoting Asian Leadership (PAL) with Keio University! The program was a week long, but we went there a few days ahead of time to explore and revisit our favourite places.
Last week, we finished up exploring the Snoopy Museum in Roppongi, Tokyo, by checking out their massive gift shop!
There was so much stuff to look at and so many temptations but I manage to resist them and we only bought refrigerator magnets. At least something to remember this trip by.
We ended the day with the P.A.L. farewell party with the Keio students! That means the program was finally over! And soon, this trip too. We only had 1 full day left in Tokyo before our flight back to Singapore so here we go!
11 August 2016. Wednesday.
We kinda had a late start because we had such a long day yesterday and were really tired, so slept in a bit in the comfort of our Airbnb. But we decided to spend our last day not too far from where we stayed; in Ikebukuro!
The first place we went to was Sunshine City, where they had the biggest Pokemon Centre Mega Tokyo!
Now I've played many of the main series Pokemon games way back in the day (from Yellow to Platinum and most recently, Sword) but I wouldn't call myself a huge Pokemon fan; definitely not as huge as my cousins, who requested some merch. We also did airfrov for some people and this was the easiest stuff to get.
So after our brief visit to the Pokemon Centre to scout for items we could get, we decided to spend the rest of our day in another observatory (we had gone up the Tokyo Skytree during this trip too)!
This
is the Sunshine 60 Sky Circus! Which is a viewing platform that offers a
360 degree panoramic view of Tokyo 251 metres above ground. But even
more than that; they have different installations and VR experiences to
stimulate the senses through sight, touch, emotion, and surprise! (Cr: Sunshine City Observatory)
Source: Time Out
Your very soul will be released as they say. I'm not sure what that means but it sounds fun so we decided to go for it.
Just a little background info; on the east side of Ikebukuro is
Sunshine City, which has the 240 metre tall Sunshine 60 skyscraper at
its centre. At 60 floors and 239.7m high, it was the tallest building in
Asia when it was completed in 1978, until it was surpassed by the 63
Building in Seoul in 1985. (Cr: Wikipedia) The Sky Circus that we're going to is at the top of Sunshine 60!
The building itself doesn't look like much on the outside, but the inside is a lot more interesting.
Source: Pinterest
After getting our tickets, we headed into the elevator!
The elevator had some fairytale-like interior and had music and
narration that I guess was just talking about Sunshine 60 or the
installations they had up top. It was in Japanese so I couldn't really
understand it.
After a couple of minutes, we arrived at the top! And man, they really weren't kidding about the panoramic views.
But there were also a lot of digital screens that you could interact with.
This one for example had planes flying across.
After walking for a bit we arrived at what I would guess is the first main area:
I think from here we kinda got the sense of what this place has to
offer besides the VR stuff, which is mainly a lot of photo spots.
And amazing views of course.
Can you see the smol Tokyo Skytree in the distance?
I bet this place would look cool at night with the lights on and
stuff. But since we had a hard time taking photos at night when we went
up the Tokyo Skytree, we figured we'd come in the daytime.
We definitely didn't expect there to be so many families up here though.
This whole hallway was like the infamous house of mirrors. It had those goofy looking mirrors that distort your reflection.
Well this was just an inverse but you get it.
My mirror case kinda fixed it tho haha
More like this:
This is what Sean would look like if he became a body builder:
Then we went into an actual hallway of mirrors:
That was also constantly changing lights! And where I got the teaser for last week's ending:
The ultimate mirror selfie (well we tried):
As you can tell, we had a ton of fun in here just taking photos:
I'm not sure I did this right.
It would've been a lot better if no one else was around, but alas,
that'll never happen. But it was nice to just see all the different
lights they could project.
After we exited the hall of mirrors we came across the kaleidoscope wall:
There were these holes in the wall you could look into and see different patterns like this:
And this:
And this:
The wall itself was rainbow-coloured as well:
It was just mirrors, mirrors everywhere:
They also had decals on the windows like those in the Tokyo Skytree:
And this lighted cloud thing:
And this umbrella thingy:
The screen that accompanied the umbrella just showed different things that would rain down on you. I think the umbrella itself also vibrated and had different sounds according to what objects were on screen so it was.. something.
We finally arrived at the VR section of the Sky Circus, but as expected, there were long lines for them and it was really crowded.
We also found out that you have to pay extra to try them, and since we're not that big fans of VR to begin with, we just looked at the other people doing it.
Then we came across this big screen:
That would transition into an interactive screen!
It kinda reminded me of the Xbox Kinect where you could play different AR type games with your room projected onto the screen.
After that we came to this swirly looking hallway.
And it actually looked pretty cool! Or I guess it would've if there weren't so many kids around.
This is probably one of the most colourful hallways I've ever seen.
But I think the illusion only works if you're further back tho.
Anyway, this post has been going on for quite a while so I think I'm gonna end it here for now. Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion to Travel Japan 2.0!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat’s Travels #75 (Japan 2.0): Shopping at Snoopy Museum! 🐶