indessed roscivs

Our first goal was to navigate the subway system. Fortunately, our previous adventures in London made us familiar with the general idea—buy a ticket, go through these machine-gates that eat your ticket and let you through, wander through long hallways, up and down escalators and stairs, following signs with a particular color or shape on them, wait at a platform for the train to come hurtling by, wait by the side as the doors open and people pour out, then hop on yourself (while minding the gap) and hope you can squeeze into a seat somewhere. The automatic voices announce your destination, you disembark (once again minding the gap), wind your way up the stairs/escalators, out through the machine-gates that eat your ticket again (this time not returning it), and up through an exit back into the outer world.

In Japan, the sitation was nearly identical, with the main difference being that there are different privately-owned subway lines, so in some situations you have to purchase one kind of ticket, travel to a transfer point, and then completely exit and re-enter a different subway entrance in order to get to your final destination. This was the case with our trip to Roppongi Hills as there was no direct line from the Shibuya Station, but with some pointing to maps and some basic tourist Japanese, we figured out what combination of tickets and stations would get us to the giant spider.

Riding the subway actually felt strangely familiar; there were people reading manga and playing on their Nintendo DS, just as they might on a bus in Seattle. They seemed blissfully unaware of our presence as they continued in their daily routine. I hardly seemed out of place among the other (albeit Japanese) sightseers on a day trip to Roppongi Hills.

Once we ascended from the depths of the subway and into the harsh sunlight, the giant spider was almost immediately visible at the base of the Mori Tower. We took a few dozen pictures with it until we couldn’t stand the heat any more and started hunting for some air conditioned refuge. The Tokyo City View (the observation deck at the top of the Mori Tower) seemed to be the best bet, so we headed on up. I was impressed that even at the bottom of the tower, you still had a breathtaking view over the city.

The view at the top of the tower was even more impressive—a 360-degree panoramic view of the city. Tokyo was a lot more like what I’d expected London to be—tall skyscrapers as far as the eye can see. It’s like they’d taken the main five blocks of downtown Seattle with the tallest buildings there, and copy-pasted thousands of times out to the horizon. Off in the distance you could see various clumps of very tall buildings, and in any direction you looked, you were still met with tightly concentrated downtown-style buildings.

The other thing that amazed me was, despite the crowded urban feeling that extended seemingly forever (disappearing at last into the haze that hung over the city constantly), green spaces still appeared frequently, whether it was a garden on the top of a roof, or an astoundingly large park. It was a strange but perfect balance between business-like cement and digital screens, and lush, leafy trees and greenery.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.