Day 352: TeamLab Borderless in Odaiba — Grownup Dinner at Hoshinoya
The rain had moved out overnight. Today was a blue-sky winter day — our first full day in Tokyo! We’re stoked.
I took a jog along the Meguro River that runs past our hotel. There is a gym attached to the Gajoen but apparently it’s closed on Mondays. Huh? More surprising: when attempting to go Tuesday morning I learned that on all other days it opens at 9am. Interesting. Apparently the Japanese don’t go to the gym in the morning.
The path along the Meguro is a prime destination for cherry blossom viewing when they are in bloom. There are countless trees — can only imagine what it looks like in spring. On the way back I saw all the Japanese school kids heading to the bus stop with their matching yellow bucket hats.
We hit the 8th floor exec lounge for breakfast and then did a quick school session in the room.
We had tickets for the TeamLab Borderless digital art museum in Odaiba today. Odaiba is the man made set of “islands” southeast of the central part of the city. We took a couple trains to the Tokyo Teleport Station and walked through the Megaweb Toyota City Showcase. I drove a simulator demonstrating some of Toyota’s new safety features.
Then we grabbed smoothies at Rookie Cafe, a car themed lounge with a kids play area.
TeamLab is an art collective / creative group that brings together artists, programmers, engineers, animators, designers, etc. and implements museums and art installations. Borderless is their latest installation, billed as the “world’s first digital art museum.” It’s a 10,000 sq meter space that uses 520 computers and 470 projectors to create dynamic images and experiences that are constantly in motion. It’s called Borderless because the art moves freely through the space, down the halls, into different rooms. It was pretty cool.
After the museum we did some shopping in Odaiba, picking up a couple shirts for James. The kids tried their luck at another claw arcade game and continued to be frustrated. My earlier estimate that it would take another 500 yen for them to figure out those things are a ripoff will turn out to be an underestimate.
We hustled back to The Gajoen and went directly to the cocktail hour in the exec lounge, a perfect kid dinner / adult cocktail spot.
But we only had 20 minutes or so because we had to get downstairs to meet… our babysitter!
Sam and Team at Small World Travel gifted us a sitter and dinner as a thank you for the business we’ve given them. Really thoughtful and generous.
May was an awesome sitter. She’s Philipino, speaks perfect English and was a total pro with the kids. We had gotten chocolate frogs with collectible Harry Potter cards for the kids to open when we left, just to avoid meltdowns. Everything went smoothly.
Dinner was at the new hotspot, Hoshinoya Tokyo. That said, we saw no other customers. We were whisked from the entrance into a private room and then experienced a seven-course performance / art exhibit that also happened to be a very tasty meal.
It was fun to have a grownups only meal. We went for cocktails in Sydney a couple different times when my mom was there but before that our last sitter was at Alila Manggis in Indonesia in September.
Much of the conversation centered on the creativity of the food but we also did some recapping of this crazy year and a little thinking about what’s next — but no ah-ha solutions yet.
A memorable meal and such a fun night.
