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The Many Adventures of Oriol in Japan


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So, I had the idea of organsing a trip to Japan for quite some time and last year I found the courage, time and resources to put it all together. And boy was I in for a trip!

 

I decided my trip would be a mix of culture and parks because it’s not every day that you get to experience Japan, its sights and its quirky yet fascinating culture.

 

The first leg of the trip was basically Tokyo, which has some city parks worth checking out for a couple of hours each. I figured it would be much more natural to just cover the different parts of the city and include those parks in the sight-seeing process, so I visited Joypolis, Hanyashiki, LaQua, Tobu Zoo and Yokohama Cosmoworld on different days.

 

First of all, I want to apologise for the quality of some of the pictures but my phone camera has a small crack so depending on the camera angle, there might be a glare in some of the photos.

 

The first park that I visited was Joypolis. Quoting the happiest cruise that ever sailed “it’s a small world”, I bumped into another fellow Spanish coaster enthusiast (Borja) just as I was exiting the Tokyo Tower and we decided to tackle Odaiba together and have some fun at Joypolis.

 

The train ride to Joypolis was just stunning, with some amazing views of the bay and the eclectic Odaiba and Minato area. Once we got off, Joypolis was just some minutes away on foot. The park is inside a shopping centre and it looked like crowds were manageable: we decided we would just hop on Gekion and check out the halfpipe ride, which to us looked like a borderline credit. Since we are not that into gaming and the rest was just a huge array of games and simulators, we opted not to ride anything else and we paid for both rides separately.

 

Now, onto Gekion, this looked like an interesting Gerstlauer concept that lots of other small-ish parks should adopt. The layout is short but the fact that the first half is a sort of interactive dark ride makes it appear longer than it actually is. To be honest, I was expecting it to be a +1 but it was SO much fun being able to challenge other riders on your car to tap to the rhythm of the music to score points before the actual coaster portion that I actually forgot how weak the launch was. All in all, very compact model but great fun.

 

Funny story is that since I had been up for like 30 hours straight the day we went, I couldn’t wear my contact lenses and I had my prescription glasses on. As I am rather short-sighted yet I didn’t want to risk going on the coaster with my glasses on, I had to leave them in the locker. So, the dark ride portion was just a blur of flashes, beams and lights LOL (now I know what an acid trip looks like!). I guess I didn’t do that bad because I ended up being the 2nd best on my car, yay!

 

Halfpipe was a contraption bigger than I expected it to be. I have no idea who manufactures these models but they are so much fun and seeing all four pods going up and down the half pipe was quite a sight. The park did quite a good job at making sure operations allowed the queue to move as steadily as possible but we ended up queueing a good 30 minutes for it. We didn’t know it was interactive until we were given the instructions once we boarded the “skates” (which looked like a stand-up coaster seat). Turns out riders have to step on their skates at one specific point at the same time so that the skate actually spins as it would do on a real halfpipe. We ended up getting multiple 720º spins and the experience itself was less nauseous than it would appear by the looks of the ride. Great ride that I would love to see at other parks!

 

The second day ended up being much more tiring than I would have expected it to be. I basically walked along the entire Akihabara section ending up at Ueno park, before visiting the National Museum, ending up in Asakusa, where the Hanayashiki park was. I expected this to be a small-sized park with some charm but to be honest it looked like the place had seen better days and the rides, whilst well maintained, it looked a bit outdated and uninteresting. I ended up having a solo lap on the park’s Roller Coaster. I didn’t have high hopes for this ride and I am glad I didn't because it was rather weak in terms of intensity but I can appreciate a coaster by its history, so I ended enjoying its surroundings and the fact that it was shoe-horned between buildings and the perimeter of the park.

 

What struck me as odd was the park being almost empty although the Asakusa shrine is really close.You can almost see the park’s S&S Space Shot from the shrine area...

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Yay for 12-hour flights! Add this to a 2-hour flight from Barcelona to London...

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I checked the shrine around the Tokyo Tower and found this really bizarre and disturbing site with figurines dedicated to unborn children...

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Although not as tall as the Eiffel Tower, it sure looks like it!

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The view at the top were amazing!

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Tokyo is just huge.

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The visit to the observation deck was very interesting. It even featured a couple of preshows, one of them even had the tower's attendants interacting with the portrait of the tower architect.

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The views from Odaiba are unmatched

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On our way out we found this ENORMOUS Gundam, just because Tokyo. (photo by Borja)

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Flashy entrance to Joypolis (photo by Borja)

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The instructions to score points on Halfpipe. (photo by Borja)

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The queue even featured a camera that placed filters on people. It was entertaining ;-) (photo by Borja)

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The second day I found myself strolling along the main Akihabara streets, full of Sega gaming stations, pachinkos, multiple stores and a bit of an 'otaku' atmosphere.

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Ueno is one of Tokyo's huge parks. I just find fascinating how such a big city can still have such big parks.

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The entrance to Hanayashiki was a bit tucked away from the main streets of Asakusa.

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The park's ローラーコースター (Japanese transliteration of 'roller coaster')

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As you can see, the ride, the train screams old-school.

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Although some areas looked like they could use a bit of TLC, there were some charming spots like this.

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As you can see, the park was bursting with people riding the park's signature coaster.

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Next to the park was Asakusa's Sensoji temple, which was rammed with tourists.

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As was Nakamise-dori.

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Since I started from the back of the temple, I ended up exiting the area at the main entrance Kaminarimon with its huge Japanese paper lantern.

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Before taking the metro back to the hostel, I had a glimpse at Tokyo Skytree (current second tallest building in the world), Asahi's headquarters (middle, ressembling a beer glass) and the Asahi Flame (also known by Japanese as 金のうんこ, literally 'the Golden Turd').

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