So today was all about seeing last minute stuff. We started by going over to the Prada store in the very yuppie Tokyo Shopping District. No, we did not buy anything there, but my architecture professor told me that I had to see the building and you can see why. It is a very strange building. We also went to a neat Sushi resturant where the chefs would make the dishes and then put them on tracks which cycle thoughout the resturant. Then in the end the waitress charges you based on how many dishes of what color you have taken. There was this one dish with strawberries on top in this white stuff, and something brown at the bottom, so I grabbed it. I asked Avid what it was, he asked the chef, and he said “strawberry cake”. How exotic. But I also had some raw salmon with rice. That was pretty good.
The next task was to find Prada of Tokyo… not to buy a $1000 bag but to check out the architecture. This store was the one building my architecture professor told me I needed to find while I was here. When we finally found it (a bunch of guys asking a police officer where the Prada store was was a bit awkward) you could tell that is was unique. It was designed by Swiss architects, looks like a glass beehive from the outside and its all white on the inside. An all white interior with an all glass facade creates very bad thermal gain problems… tisk tisk to the architects. See… I am already turning into an architecture snob. How great.
We stopped by the Edo-Tokyo Museum which explains the history of Tokyo back to when it was known as Edo. It was really neat except for the awkward part where we were standing in a crowd of Japanese learning about how Americans killed their relatives.
Then it was about time to head over to the K-1 Hero Championship Tournament. Basically it was a series of “fights” of two guys punching and kicking each other. Generally, it would be whoever got the first hit in would knock the other guy to the ground. Then they would wrestle around for a while punching each other in the face. It was strange how the event in terms of going in, the crowd, the atmosphere, etc was all just like going to a baseball game here. Nothing seemed foreign at all, except I couldn’t understand anything anyone was yelling. All the announcements were also made in english so that helped.
After that, we went over to a trendy part of town to have a last-dinner-in-Japan dinner. Dispite taking them 50 minutes to seat us and continously forgetting to bring us water after being asked multiple times, the food was very good. We then caught the last train back to the apartment for a good nights sleep before a full day of travelling.
- Mike
Leave a Reply