23. Over to Odaiba

Well waking up to a nice clear day, we headed out to Odaiba which is a new business area in Tokyo. It is built on reclaimed land in the middle of the harbour. This is linked to Tokyo by monorail and subway. Since you get a much nicer view from a monorail rather than the subway, we proceeded above ground.

As the pics show, architecturally it is aiming for the future, the one on the right is a convention centre, however, once you get there it is also aiming to emulate the past.


The main things to do in Odaiba are look at the shops, go to the Toyota display building and to Segaworld. Once we got off the monorail we arrived at the dubiously named "Venus Fort" which is modelled on the streets of Venice. Inside the fake skyscape changes colour from sunrise to sunset to night-time all within a two-hour time frame. There are lots of fountains and stuff and the information staff are all dressed up as if they were from 15th century Italy. Cheesy, but not in an American Donald Trump kind of way though.


In the Toyota building they had an F1 simulator which is an empty chassis from the 2003, it was a struggle getting in, but once in it was pretty cool. I just hope Toyota get some success in F1 so they hang around. They also had a huge range of cars, if they brought some of the cars on offer to Australia, they would certainly have a different perception. Oh, and you can pick up a Lexus IS200 over there for about $30kAUD, not bad!

After this it was a walk down to the artificial beach and a cruise to Asakusa. In case you are interested, after a night out having the best meal of my life what do I eat? McDonalds of course, and yes it is as crap in Japan as it is in Australia.