Odaiba, VenusFort & Alice Nine

On the show-ride that is the yurikamome-train to Odaiba
Yesterday, on the 15th, we had a concert to go to at Odaiba city in Tokyo. It's an amusement-area placed on man-made islands, initially build as a fort (daiba means fort) during the Edo-period in the 1600rds, as a defence against attacks from the sea, mainly British attacks.
Now though it houses various different kinds of amusement: museums, shopping-malls, a Ferris-wheel and venues.

One of the most fascinating things about going to Odaiba though, is the ride there on the yurikamome. It's an elevated train that takes you through Tokyo, across the rainbow-bridge and to the odaiba city island and the view is absolutely magnificent!
You feel like you're floating among the skyscrapers as you travel and the train makes a little detour as it crosses the bridge so those riding it get a full view of the harbour, the replica of the statue of liberty and the towering ferris-wheel onm the island.

Even better is when you take the ride back in the dark and the city becomes a thousand pinpricks of shimmering lights on pitch-black background. The bridge becomes a shimmering string floating in empty space and you glide on through the world of artificial stars as you pass through skyscrapers and towers.

Odaiba City at night. We couldn't take pictures through the windows on the yurikamome, so this is found on google.

On eating at the VenusFort
Once at Odaiba, we made our way through the artfully crafted streets to a building called VenusFort. VenusFort is a shopping-centre designed to simulate a medieval fort-town, which means that the floors were made to look like cobbled stone, that every shop was embedded in tall 'buildings' made to look like white-washed stone, with each of their little, useless wooden door. There were street-lamps too and more park-benches inside that building than I've seen on actual streets here in Japan this far.

The most fascinating feature of that building though, was by far the ceiling. It was made to look like the outside sky and it changes so it can simulate morning, midday, evening and night.
This means that while we were inside the fort it looked and felt like night-time at a south-european city, even though the sun was still shining bright outside.

I'm not sure my companions were half as fascinated as I was, but I love stuff like that so I most certainly was enjoying our track through the 'streets' in VenusFort.  I think I looked more at the architecture than the goods in the shopsXD.
Inthere we went to a food-court serving everything from indian curry to ramen, we ate and then hurried on to find our concert-venue.

On rushing for Alice Nine

We found a venue called Zepp Tokyo, but after half an hour suddenly realized that was the wrong Zepp - we needed to go to DiverCity, which was somewhere else, though still in Odaiba which was our luck.
After a mad dash around the place it turned out to be near the Gundam 00 statue and we did get there in plenty of time for the concert to start, though some of my friends were probably a bit annoyed with the spot they got.
I was just pleased to have a seat, since Alice Nine, while pretty, really aren't my kind of music, but it was certainly enjoyable none the less:D
~A~