I’ve been MIA for quite a while, and I’m sorry for that. Honestly life got in the way, but I’ve also been a bit more reluctant about writing. Mostly because it makes me miss Japan a lot, and especially these last few days of our summer trip. These where probably some of the best we had ever. You can already read about the full trip on Filipe’s blog, btw. One thing I don’t want is to drag these posts onto this next summer. Life goes on after all. So here we go.
It was our first time actually staying in Shinagawa, and we took the opportunity to, under scorching heat, go in Tokyo tower’s direction. We got on the Yamanote line and stopped around Shiba park, from where you can already see the famous red tower.
After walking around the park and taking a look at the Buddhist temple there, (while also enjoying every bit of shadow provided by the trees) we went in Tokyo tower. As we had gone up before, we didn’t this time — the girls were starting to get hungry so we tried to search for a place no eat, with no success.
We walked on to Roppongi Hills, an area I also enjoy quite a lot, and spotted a small summer festival that encompassed a concert and some food stalls. There was cold beer and free empty tables in the shadow — our cue to stay.
We stayed there for quite a while, trying to escape the heat and enjoying the vibe around us.
We had absolutely zero plans so we decided to hop on the subway to Odaiba. Once there, right next to the station there was a children’s playground area. It was an odd one. It was basically two tunnels that were shaped like a circle and they would intersect inside. When I looked at it I thought ‘how the heck are kids supposed to play here?‘. It couldn’t have been a more narrow-minded-adult thought, as our two kids started to immediately play around inside. They would chase each other inside, and call for one another on opposite sides of each tunnel and they would hop on the top. They then started playing with another boy there — kids don’t need to speak to each other to have fun, simple laughs would do —, and then another girl around their age showed up. She spoke a little bit of English, and between my very weak Japanese and her English we managed to understand that she was 5 years old, she lived in one of the apartments next to the playground, and her name was Eimi. Something that might have gotten lost in translation might have been the fact that she was alone in said apartment and waiting for mum to come back home (which is not that unusual in Japan): She then invited our girls to go to her place and play…and that was when we kindly declined and decided to go to the supermarket to grab something to eat.
I could spend hours inside a Japanese supermarket. But we quickly grabbed our items and headed down to Odaiba Beach. It was such a wonderful wonderful afternoon. The girls had been super happy playing with her friend for quite a while and now they were at the beach?? Couldn’t get any better. The temperature was finally dropping because of the sun set and I was in love with the colours around us. We had a lovely time.
Only a minor tiny thing dampened my enthusiasm for that place. Right when we got to the beach and went over to the water I saw what looked like a duck’s head. But there was no body to the ducks’ head, which was odd, but I didn’t think too much about it. Then the duck dove in the water and I thought I was finally going to see the rest of the duck… but I had no such luck, because the odd duck did not resurface. It couldn’t have been a… oh I don’t know a snake, right? Surely there were no snakes there. Nah. Nevertheless I told the girls to only splash their feet in the water and not move too much inward — you couldn’t see a thing in there anyway. Only when we were walking out I saw several signs that read ‘Beware of snakes’. 🙃 So there’s my odd duck! I was a bit freaked out, I must say. Oh and Filipe got his foot stung by what we think was probably a bee or wasp.
We were then on a mission to find a place to have dinner. We went into one of the shopping centres next to the beach, Aqua City, where we had an incredible meal in a super cosy restaurant. The guys there were super nice and it was the perfect way to relax after an amazing day out.
Everybody was quite obviously tired.
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