🐬💍🚇🥩🪐
we did so much today. if i’d been alone, everything we did today would have been spread across 3 days for sure.
maxell aqua park
our airbnb is like a 20ish minute walk from a train station. so i headed out at 9 for our first stop. on the way, i encountered some incredible luck. i stopped at a vending machine to get an energy drink i love called “real gold”. one small can is ¥110, like 70 cents. i put the coins in and pressed the button and it gave me four of them by mistake. fate smiles upon me this day.
our first activity is maxell aqua park. i’ve done this every year now, because it rocks. i wanted alex and mike to see it too. its a little aquarium / zoo type thing, where the main focus is a dolphin show.
we arrived when they opened, at 10am. the dolphin show isnt until 11:30, so we had some time to explore the other exhibits. last year they had a capybara, but it was replaced with a tortoise this year for some reason.
they also have a pretty big penguin section, with 3 different types of penguin. there was a big box of ice cubes in the corner of the room, and one penguin kept running over to it, picking up an ice cube, and then sprinting all over the room as fast as it could carrying the ice cube in its beak, then going back to the box and putting the ice cube away. then it would pick up a different one and do it again. we watched it do this for like 20 minutes. it was very fast, so i had a hard time getting a picture of him. the one i settled on is still very blurry. they also had some really cute poisonous frogs.
the dolphin show
i love this dolphin show. i brought my mom to it last year, and now i’ve brought alex and mike. i really enjoy using this show as an opportunity to try and catch photos at a high shutter speed. i dont really know how to explain this. you have to make the camera take the picture very quickly when there is a moving subject, or it will be blurry. i took like 200 pictures at this show, and like 20 of them were usable. here’s my 5 favorites
side quest - wt ring u got bithc?
so, my favorite video games of all time are “souls” games made by from software. dark souls 1-3, bloodborne, sekiro, elden ring. that kind of game. almost no one reading this knows what im talking about, and thinks i had a stroke with that title above, but anyway,
theres a store in japan that sells merchandise from those games. in those games, there are rings that give you different effects. one of my favorite rings in the dark souls games is called the chloranthy ring. it makes your stamina regenerate faster. from software is a japanese company, and the games they make are extremely beloved by fans. their games have been very popular for years, but elden ring was for sure their biggest hit globally. i imagine anyone who is even a little familiar with video games has heard of elden ring at least.
this store sells handmade, extremely high quality rings, earrings, pendants, shirts, etc. from dark souls / elden ring. you can buy them online, but i wanted to get it in japan. so early on in planning this trip i established a side quest to find this store and get this ring. they have a few locations in japan, but i figured the tokyo one would be the best stocked. so we headed to shibuya, to a mall called parco.
it started raining today, and its going to be pretty ugly and rainy for the next few days. it was a bit of a walk from shibuya station (starting with the famous “shibuya crossing”) to get to the mall we were headed for.
shibuya reminds me of bladerunner. which makes sense, because i am pretty sure the aesthetic of bladerunner’s los angeles is heavily inspired by mega cities like tokyo and hong kong.
after a bit of a trek through rainy streets and tourist crowds, we found the mall and started looking for this store. i eventually found it, thanks to this sculpture of a character from elden ring, named “iron fist alexander”.
the store was pretty small and very busy, but i found the ring and bought it. side quest complete!
nerdiest picture i will ever take, the one ring and a ring from dark souls. its a really beautiful ring, and its kind of expensive - ¥36,000, or about $210. they have to hand cut 33 peridot stones to fit into each little slot. but hey, it will make my stamina regenerate faster, so its worth it.
i was worried that i would need to buy the ring here and then get it resized back home, because the biggest size they have is a 23 (japanese ring size), which is an 11 in freedom units.
the ring fits perfectly on my ring finger. i will probably still try to get it resized, as i would prefer to wear it on my middle finger, and it is too small for that.
while we were at this mall, i also stopped by a capcom store to get some souvenirs for a friend who loves the resident evil games.
engaging in capitalism
our next commitment was at 6pm, and we had some time to kill. we wanted to escape from the dense crowds of shibuya, so we headed to odaiba. we were hungry but didn’t know what we wanted, so we all got different things at the food court in diver city mall. i got some tonkatsu, basically pork chops.
it wasn’t incredible or anything. solid 6.5 or 7 out of 10. the rice and miso soup were both excellent though.
we walked around the mall for a bit, and stopped to see the giant gundam.
we also walked over to the greatest smoking section in the entire country
it was raining quite a bit, so we didn’t stick around here for long.
we still had a couple hours to kill, so we started walking towards the train we needed to take, but stopped to go visit a second nearby mall called aqua city. they have a statue of liberty outside for some reason, which led to maybe the best photo i have taken this trip so far:
we walked around this mall for quite a while. i forgot to bring a scarf on this trip, and decided to try to buy one. during this process, i learned there are 2 different words for scarf in japanese. スカーフ, or “sukaafu”, literally the word scarf, is like a light fabric, “fashion” scarf. but there is also マフラー, or “mafuraa”, which i guess is like muffler, for thicker scarves for cold weather. i think i want a warm one.
i asked in a bunch of shops but nowhere had any. we also found a japanese taco bell.
we didn’t eat here, but i think it is interesting that you can order beer at taco bell here. asahi super dry, the people’s beer.
we found a little covered area with a bench right outside the mall to sit and relax at for a bit. this is a boring photo, just a bench. but this bench was a life saver. a place to sit outside without getting rained on. i will forever love this bench.
teamlab planets
our next stop was teamlab planets, also in odaiba. i went to this in 2024 and 2025, and wrote blog posts about it both times. so this time i decided to just leave the camera in the lockers at the entrance and not take the exact same photos and videos i have already taken.
this place is really something else. it is the #1 thing i recommend people do if they visit tokyo. there really isn’t anything else like it, and it is nearly impossible to describe. it is a very surreal art experience, and thats basically all i can say.
this was a really long day. it was still raining, so we just went straight home from here. it took about an hour to get home, since we had to get off of the island of odaiba and back into tokyo proper. on the way home we stopped at the goat of all convenience stores, family mart, to get some famichiki. a little individual piece of fried chicken. its like 9/10 good and costs ~$1. incredible.
i crashed pretty soon after getting home. its been about 13 hours since then and i am still so tired.
