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.