Had a few problems with the blogger server so a bit of a break. Yesterday I headed out to Odiaba to see what the fuss was about. To start with you take a monorail out there which to make the Rainbow Bridge (one storey for trains, for other for cars) makes a beautiful loop through 270 degrees to cross the bridge before passing through wonderland. The furthest stop to the Tokyo Bigsight (or International Convention Centre) is pointless if there`s not an interesting display on so I stopped at Pallete Town which has an amazing interatcive Toyota experience which lets you choose any Toyota built in the last ten years from a stack (literally a stack) and drive it round a special circuit.

It was closed yesterday for maintenance.

Fuck.

Got to ride on the biggest ferris wheel:

But the pictures I took were all fairly crap due to the windows being filthy. To give you some idea of how high it was (115m):

Seeing as everything else was closed for that single day all year (they must`ve heard I was coming) I headed to Venus Fort, the womens only shopping centre set in a roman style. Sounds bad? Uh-uh. Here`s what reality brings the prozac bunny...

I mean, seriously, this is indoors. The sky becomes starlight at night to match the sky outside. I`ve seen this in Las Vegas but it`s shocking to see so many females frothing at the mouth. I feared for my own credit cards. I defy any of my female friends/relatives not to have a creaming orgasm in this building....

Moving on to the Emerging Science Museuem which was fantastic and well worth a visit, especially the earthquake zone. The photographical highlight, however, was the dome with one million LEDs displaying the current earth weather (plus more besides). Stunning. It`s about ten metres across:

Right then, the view of the rainbow bridge during the day and then at night:

Okay, today I went back to the botanical gardens (because I`ve always had a soft spot for Botany) and woo-hoo they were open today. So because it`s late I`ll only put up the best photos as it`s costing me an arm and a leg to do this from here. All I`d add is that nobody does a blossoming garden like the japanese, the greenhouses had some stunning flowers, and there were some Magnolia trees ranging from 20-30m. I wish it was flowering time to see them, unfortunately today they were practically dead:

And I`ll leave you on the note that a) most Tokyo taxis are Nissan Cedrics (seriously) and b) they coat Naan breads at the Indian restaurants here with honey. This is foul. Don`t stint on the chillies though!