We are a few days into a three week vacation in Japan. I will stay on an extra week to go to the ICIAM conference in Tokyo. It is the major Applied Mathematics conference, held every four years (so I refer to it as the "Olympics" of Applied Math). The conference was our excuse to take a holiday here as my grant can cover my airfare. The timing put us in pretty warm weather, 35+ and humid, but we are surviving with long breaks in air conditioning.
We were four days in Tokyo at the start of the visit, staying in the Shinjuku area of town. Our hotel room was very small. I would say it is the smallest hotel room I have ever stayed in, but I have experience in a smaller one in Hong Kong. The interesting feature of the room was the fancy toilet with a control panel:
I can't speak for Veronica, but I did not feel confident enough to test out any of these features. My hesitancy might be due to the fact that I am now officially old! I turned 60 on this leg of the trip. The birthday celebration was a fancy lunch in the Tokyo SkyTree (Japan's answer to the CN tower, although it probably goes the other way). Nice view!
We had another nice view experience a few days before in the Tokyo municipal building in our Shinjuku neighborhood. This is a free trip although a hundred meters lower.
Our neighborhood had a number of other attractions. It is famous for numerous small, old school bars in alleyways. We went to one of them and had a beer or two and small plates of bar food.
The Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden was near our hotel. These are extensive gardens with both traditional Japanese and European style formal gardens.
We did three cultural things. We visited the Suginami Animation Museum (that was more for me than Veronica). Hey, I know these characters and the anime they come from! We had a nice lunch at a local sushi bar. Veronica looked up how to say "no wasabi, please".
We visited the Sensoji Temple and lost our good humor after being too long in the heat without food. I bought an amulet against misfortune (or doom or maybe evil, I forget now -- anyway I am safe now from one of those three).
We also had an interactive art experience at the teamLab site. This was really interesting with a bunch of the exhibits featuring knee deep water you waded through. Pictures do not do justice to the exhibits but there are teamLab exhibits in other cities, and I would recommend going to one if you happen to be anywhere nearby. On the way to the exhibit, we took the wrong bus, but then had a nice walk over a bridge and another view opportunity I will throw in at the end.
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