I've been to Tsukiji market back in 2015; this was before the wholesale market moved to Toyosu. Many restaurants and vendors are still around, so we woke up early to eat at Tsukiji. We started off with an egg omelet or tamago. Eating it reminded me of the tamago that my dad makes from time to time. It was soft and full of dashi flavor. Afterwards, we got an oyster and sea urchin/uni. I cannot recall the price for both items, but I want to say it was less than $10 CAD. The oyster was large and the uni was fresh. I'm not an uni expert, but I find that old uni tastes extremely fishy while fresh uni tastes like butter. The giant shrimp/octopus senbei/rice cracker was our next food stop. Their shop wasn't open yet, but there was a decent line up for the place. As I waited in line, she went to grab a croquet topped with capelin roe. It was extremely delicious as well. As the shop opened up, we opted to grab an octopus senbei. It was tasty, though I'm not sure I would wait in line (apparently some people on social media claimed they have to wait nearly an hour at peak times) for this snack.
After filling up for breakfast, we walked to a quieter part of Tsukiji. We noticed an onigiri shop, so we stopped by to purchase one for a snack later. Our next destination was SMALL WORLDS Tokyo: a museum known for displaying miniature sets. I'm not much of a modeler, besides building Gundams in the past, but I had to say I was thoroughly impressed with what SMALL WORLDS had to offer. The museum had two main floors: We started with the uppermost floor. The first exhibit had a space/rocket launch theme. They even had a launch pad in which they would launch a mini rocket into the ceiling. In the next exhibit, there were a few sets of towns across the world. I don't recall the locations myself, but if I had to hazard a guess, they were mostly European cities? They did have some Asian cities as well, though I cannot recall the exact locations. The next section was an homage to the Sailor Moon universe, which was made entirely out of glass or crystal. The coolest exhibit in my opinion was the airport set they had, which was right after the Sailor Moon exhibit. They had miniature planes taking off and landing while taxing as well! They even had a prerecorded announcer (Japanese and English) for takeoffs as well! Near the end of the floor, there was a Neon Genesis Evangelion section. I watched the anime series a few years back, though I can't say that I'm a huge fan of the set. Nevertheless, it was neat to see as well. Seeing that we finished the entire floor, we headed down a level to see what exhibits they had there. Noticing a café, we took a breather. They had various ice cream floats for sale, so we purchased one while eating our onigiri.
The lower floor had a few different exhibits, but it seemed to showcase more behind-the-scenes of how the sets were made. After spending some time, we completed the floor, headed out of the building, and walked towards Odaiba. Our first stop within Odaiba was Joypolis, an indoor amusement park. The older I get, the more prone to motion sickness I seem to become, unfortunately. To ease my way into the rides, we started with a simple fortune-telling maze/attraction. It was somewhat boring, though our next attraction was a VR like attraction featuring characters from Tokyo Revengers (a manga series and anime show). It was relatively simple, but I had to admit that I was feeling a bit queasy after the ride. We ventured on a few more attractions, like a mass-zombie shooting game, a Japanese 3D horror show, and some sort of snowmobile/racer game. For my sake, we took a break before heading off for my girlfriend to go on a few rides on her own.
It was time for food, so we left Joypolis to head towards Diver City to eat lunch at the food court. I ended up getting a tonkatsu set while she got a tempura set. Since the Gundam Base was located at the top of Diver City, I went up to take a look to see if there were any models of interest, but to generally look at what they had to display. I noticed they had a new line of recycled runner models of popular models like Exia and Barbatos. I personally thought it was a neat idea to reuse old plastic to make new runners. All of the models were black in color with bright highlights. Perhaps I'll build one in the future.
After I was done exploring Gundam Base, we went back to Joypolis till it was nearly closing. We left after getting our fill and walked around the pathway near the... sea before heading back to Asakusa. Since we ate a late lunch/early dinner, we opted to just pick up some snacks at the konbini before checking in for the night.
At this point of the trip, I realized how much Tokyo had to offer. Even though I've spent a relatively large amount of time in this metropolis as a tourist, there's so many different things that I have yet to experience.
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