Day 18: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

The area of Shinjuku, it turns out, is actually the seat of government for the entire Tokyo metropolitan area. Considering that Tokyo is the most densely populated area in the world the government is basically running an entire country. Inside this building is an observation deck that I'd been wanting to check out for a while. We had some plans for later in the day but needed to kill some time so we headed down the road a bit and hit the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.

As soon as we got in there we decide we might want to skip the observation deck until later since the line to go up was wrapped around the hall. Luckily though there was a tourist information center inside so we decided to check it out. There we found some nice, helpful documents that we could use for the rest of our time here. Suddenly while looking at the racks of info a nice lady came up and started asking us questions. How long had we been in Japan, did we use a tour service (the fact that we did it all ourselves seemed to surprise most people) and finally she asked if we wanted to take a tour of the building...Heck yes we do!

This is a traditional broom-like display that is meant to bring good luck

The architecture was a very big talking point

The building is built to withstand very strong winds

The lines are meant to convey traditional Japanese window/door slats

The actual meeting place for the Tokyo government

After the tour we checked the line again but decided to wait for another time/day on the observation deck. We had been wanting to head back to Odaiba, the man-made island that was now a huge shopping area, since we got back to Tokyo. This time we had our JR passes so the trip was done by train instead of boat but it still took about 30-40 minutes.

We've found that for some reason Japan has become a haven for failing or failed US businesses. Zima is everywhere here but more importantly they still have a few Krispy Kremes!

The Odaiaba area is really fun. There are basically three huge malls there and we checked out all of them, with another stop off at the Gundam statue to get some better pictures.

University of Florida stuff halfway around the world...wow

I want this for my house

Wait, where are we?

So we got some shopping done and had a great time revisiting one of our favorite areas from our first week. Nothing too crazy but a good time none-the-less.