The Panasonic Center and the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and later Hookah in Shinjuku

I woke up late on Friday morning since I wanted to sleep in. Roy was going to try and use his museum passes as much as possible today since they were going to expire, so he had already gone to the aquarium, and was about to go to the Panasonic center. I decided to meet up with him, and had to navigate my way there. I was able to with my handy DSi Train Map app, but forgot to get off and one of the stops, and since I was on the super express train, I ended up all the way in Yokohama, which is far out of the way, so I had to take another local train back which took some time, thankfully Roy was behind as well. I saw some cool things on the way back though like a huge baseball park with like ten baseball fields,

and a playground made of old tires and they even had a dinosaur made out of tires, wish I could have taken a picture of that but was on the train and couldn't get my camera ready in time...


Cool building by the Panasonic Center

I met up with him at the Panasonic center

and it was cool, had a lot of high tech gadgets and the whole place was awesome, to bad they didn't allow pictures, the most I can show you is this one in the free discover area and a pic they took of me at the end.

Upstairs they had a big learning thing science center, with interactive stuff everywhere, and they gave us these devices that would explain what we were looking at. The was a light color shooter game in the corner at the beginning along with holographic gems, in the center was a giant spinning black light picture where you could adjust the speed, at average speed the pictures move but the column didn't seem to move, at a faster rate everything moved and at a slower rate it looked like it was going backwards. There was also a game behind that where you had to shoot these little colored balls into the basket, and you could only throw one color it selected in, but the room itself kept changing colors so the balls would change colors too under the different lights so it was difficult, but I still managed to do better than Roy. There was a magnetic device with this magnetic liquid that would spike up when you activated the magnets. There was a back area with where you could make virtual ripple waves on the floor, test probability by rolling a ton of dice, make a design using a set amount of different shaped pieces, which we schooled the kids in, they said we were hayasugiru (too fast), and we played prime number air hockey, where the point was to reflect non-prime numbers to your opponent and they would split up, you received points equal to what prime numbers you let go into your zone, but if you let a non-prime number pass you lost all your points, and again I schooled Roy, a engineer major, in that. He did beat me though in the frequency game where you had to match up the pitches using a theromin (good job if you know what this is, else off to Wikipedia). At the end we got our pics taken by a machine and got to choose a background.

We went downstairs and I tried to take a picture, but they wouldn't let me, and it was a good shot of the main lobby with thew cool different color lights lining the floor. They had downstairs some free scientific experiments like rolling balls down different slopes, bouncing balls, and probability forming a normal curve through a plinko type device.

There was also a Lumix camera display, they showed their new HDTVs even letting you see the megapixels through a magnifier, they had a Blu-Ray section, and a Nintendo area.

We then went to the Edo-Tokyo Museum next and had to take a bunch of trains to get there. I was able to eat the bento lunch my host family had prepared for me that day on one of the trains, it was really good. The museum was right next to the Sumo arena, so I knew where it was. We got our tickets and went upstairs up a giant escalator. Int he main exhibit they had a lot on display and a lot of replicas and miatures. I'll let my pics do the talking for this.

You crossed a bridge to get into the museum.


This had to be the coolest thing there.


Difference between flash and no flash, cool


This guy looks important








I spy you















This was a great picture












Parade


Sad part is the bike part looked newer than most bikes I've seen here


I'm on top of you

All coins

Cranes


New something bugged me in here


Talk about your ancient technology...


Armor with a mustache and a kimono






Geisha


Old

Really Old


Now that's an old phone booth... pulls out my iPhone lol


There's a balloon in here !?


Toshiba you have come so far


Olympics merchandise old and new


One of the first color TVs in Japan, even says "color" on it


Bulls-eye


more fire power

Bo-bomb, never stood a chance




Last pic before the place closed

As you they had a lot of replica's, a whole could small building, replicas of the emperor parading, giant festival pieces, wood-block painting, and even more modern times, they even had nice little moving things attractions too.

They also had the balls in the cup, and was able to land it on the top peg a few times for the people there. (Yes, I learned how to do that here)


We left and I got a pic of the escalator and me in front of the Sumo building.

Saw this right before the escalator


Escalator, the Japanese guy thinks it's weird too



Sumo Building


Random pyramids behind glass


Flat escalator

He was going to see Star Trek, so he headed off to Shinjuku. I went with him because I was meeting some friends to hang out that night. I called Zach up and we met at the station. At the same time another person a bit on the creepy side came up to us and asked if I was there for the party. I thought someone in my group knew him, while Zach thought I was bringing him along, both of us didn't want him to go, and had a big laugh when we were both wrong. He was actually there for the Comic circle party that I wasn't told about, but oh well, I was hanging with my friends that night. The rest of my group showed up and we grabbed some drinks at the konbini and went to a great Hookah bar.

We saw this Karaoke building outside the konbini, it looked awesome.


Because of the rain, the streets were crowded with umbrellas

We got our own booth, and got a mango and rose hookah to start off with.





One of the friends we had with us met back up with us after vanishing and brought back a girl. We ordered another hookah, this time chocolate mint, and when we left they gave us each 1000 yen coupons because we brought with us a coupon paper, each worth another hookah, so we are defiantly going back. We grabbed some McDonalds and headed home.