Palette Town

It was a bit of a rainy day on Tuesday so we decided to hop a cab with Kirsty to Koto City, Aomi. Heidi had purchased tickets to the teamLab Borderless experience which is at the Mori Building Digital Art Museu on one of the built up industrial islands in Toyko's harbour.  

I wasn't sure what it was so I looked at the website before going. "teamLab Borderless is a group of artworks that form one borderless world. Artworks move out of rooms, communicate with other works, influence, and sometimes intermingle with each other with no boundaries". This left me with even more questions.

After we got there, at about 9:45am we joined an orderly Japanese queue, which was already moving inside to a second staging area to get us out of the elements. I was very impressed that they'd employed about 6 people to be in charge of the queues and we were inside at 10am on the dot, which was the official opening time. We met Kirsty's friend Ben inside who got through the queue surprisingly quick also.

The exhibit/experience is ridiculously amazing. You wander around a bunch of rooms with crazy light shows, sounds and music which are not just on walls but also on undulating terrains, different surfaces and also rooms with lots of mirrors. The experience is quite overwhelming by the end. Also there's no maps of the rooms or spaces provided, the point is to get lost and experience the areas over and over as quite a lot of it will have a completely different show/loop on next time you pass. Also, this place is a #boyfriends/#girlfriendsofinstagram mecca. It seems like what people are doing these days is to look as disinterested as possible while not looking at the camera and taking a lot of photos of that. Smiling/being amazed at the amazeballs lightshow is obviously for people who are not serious about their insta content, but what do I know, I still keep a blog. Get off my lawn.

Heidi and Willow falling for the beginners trap of smiling.

Even the hallways between the exhibits had amazing scenes

Waterfall room. People took turns getting the perfect waterfall shot. Willow tried to use it for a slide and was told off(this was a common theme).

The cave was much better than the last cave we went to.

"The cave" was my favourite exhibit. I tried to photograph the experience, but it was impossible as you can see my failed attempt above and I'll do a bad job of explaining it here. (I guess you'll just have to go to Tokyo and buy tickets to this thing.) You line up at the entrance of a fabricated cave so your field of view is completely immersed in the light and sound show. It feels like you're moving with the light and you can see people lose their balance a bit from time to time because the experience is so overwhelming. Also I did not see the same show once despite standing there for at least 15 minutes then walking back past about 4-5 times. So I am not sure how long the loop is but it is an impressive piece of work.

Too many smiles in the room of waves, another fail.

This was like a room of electric doorway beads but a fair bit more impressive.

Willow almost mastering the cool insta look.

Cool room which was popular with the children. There was a slide which adults could go on too! Didn't put up much resistance when Willow wanted to go on the slide again.

Heidi's favourite, the lantern room. This is pretty much what Heidi wanted to see but we had the most trouble finding it. Kirsty and Ben kindly took Willow to the cafe so we could line up for 40 minutes to see it, for 2 minutes before the staff kick you out, it was amazing!

Willow got the correct instagram look in the end, all it took was a nonviolent protest on the floor.

Afterwards we went to lunch in Shimbashi, I had read it was a popular cheap lunch area with the salarymen and had a steam locomotive in the main plaza which ticked a few boxes for me. We had some pretty good raw fish there.

It was a pretty lazy afternoon, the most that was accomplished was me foraging for supplies at the local Family Mart. We went up to Roppongi main street for a noodle dinner, I had a distrubingly large katsu curry with udon for the blog content.

The land of colours

The time to fire up the travel blog is always a favourite time of mine. This time we are spending 17 days in Japan! So ready for a late Sunday night departure flight to Tokyo we seamlessly checked in, breezed through customs and grabbed some dinner before getting effortlessly seated at about 9pm. Awesome to start the trip with such efficiency! Willow was so excited that she ended up being entertained with some food and movies until 11pm! So the 10 hour flight was pretty smooth, although only a few hours of broken sleep were to be had by Ryan and I before landing at Haneda Airport, 5am Tokyo time.

Excited for Japan!

We had to kill about 90 mins or so waiting for a bus that would take us directly to a location a quick walk to our hotel. My sister Kirsty had just finished a week or so of work just around the corner, in Beijing, so thought she may as well come home via Tokyo, and hang out for a few days with the three of us. We were all a bit delirious but excited to be in Japan, and only 30 minutes from Haneda Airport, it wasn't too long before the bus dropped us off at a hotel around the corner from ours! And it was great to see Kirsty's smiling face greet us, and more importantly, help us wrangle Willow who had become a bit restless on the bus trip.


Kirsty has been to Japan over 10 times, so using her near-local knowledge, she was able to guide us to our hotel, Villa Fontaine Roppongi. Thankfully, since she had already been there a couple of days we were able to have some quick showers in her room since we couldn't check-in until 3pm, and it still wasn't even 9am!


So we soon set off, buying our Pasmo cards for the subway, and in search of coffee. I think Tokyo has upped the standard of their coffee since we last came here in 2010, or maybe we just didn't know where to go back then, but Kirsty took us to a very cool place called Blue Bottle near Omote-Sando. Feeling better, we went for a long wander around the Harajuku area. It's such a great area and has everything - some streets are really residential and quiet, and some are lined with tiny shops and swarming with hoards of people. Willow had finally given up on trying to walk and had allowed us to put us in the little blue Kmart umbrella stroller v2. We even bought a fresh new stroller to mark the occasion, but it's true that she might getting just a bit too big for it now!

Kawaii Monster Cafe!

Despite it being before midday, Willow suddenly crashed for a nap! And although we were planning on going to a "monster cafe" that was mainly intended to be for Willow's enjoyment (but let's be real, we all wanted to see it) so we went for another wander in some stunning Tokyo weather for some more coffee while we waited for sleepyhead to wake up. We stumbled across a cute and cool little coffee shack on the side of the road, and then sure enough, little miss Willow woke up so we headed back to Kawaii Monster Cafe. We didn't have a booking, but it was only a 15 minute or so wait which we were willing to do as this place is classic Japan - crazy rainbow colours, over-the-top decorations, and eccentric Harajuku girls serving up monster-themed food that you just could not get anywhere else!

We walked into a crazy theme park of colour and fun, and got directed to a cute little booth! Willow was completely loving it all (except when she met some of the eccentric Harajuku girls) but apart from that, it didn't disappoint, and even the hilarious looking food tasted good! What a fun and crazy place - just some standard fare for our first dining experience in Japan.

A Monster curry!!

A "druggy" cocktail!

Monster burger!

What a crazy place!

We headed back out into Harajuku, along Takeshita Street , where people fill the pedestrian street lined with shops selling all kinds of things which you can definitely not normally buy in Australia! And back on the subway to the hotel where we could check-in and I desperately needed a nap! Willow, after her nap was well-rested, so hung out "in Kirsty's room" for an hour or so, while Ryan and I had some much needed down time before dinner! And that we did, in a relatively spacious hotel room, as far as Tokyo hotel rooms go!

Takeshita Street in Harajuku

Kirsty wanted to take us to a nice restaurant, En in Shibuya, that she had been to a few times before. It was basically getting to rush hour, so the subway was fun! And then Shibuya was swarming with people! Because restaurants and shops are often on all levels of tall buildings (not just the ground floor) it can sometimes be hard to find places (well Google finds it hard to tell you how to get to the 17th floor in a building). So after some confusion that was quite funny, we made it! Willow was pleased to know that kicking shoes off at the door was actually an enforced rule, and not just her being silly.


We sat down at a lovely little sunken table on tatami mats and had a delicious meal including blackened cod and sashimi. Willow liked lying on the cushions, and was luckily entertained with the tablet or our phones, and finally got sleepy again. On the way home, she was finally asleep again, and we all had an early night after a great first day in Tokyo!!