Starry City Skylines 🏙 - TacoCat’s Travels #290 (Tokyo)

Hey Hive!

I'm currently recounting our anniversary trip to Tokyo back in Feb 2023! It'd been at least 3 years since we visited Tokyo and the last time was pre-covid so we decided to go back and find some new places to explore while revisiting our favourite hot-spots.

Last week, we continued our day post-soufflé pancake snack by going to the Tokyo Tower!

It's actually one of our goals to go up all the high-rise buildings in every city we visit. We've been up the Tokyo Skytree before but not the tower so we figure we'd go and take a look, even though it's not as tall.

There are two floors to the observatory, at 150m and at 250m, and our ticket enables us to visit both. We enjoyed the views at 150m and explored the observatory and gift shop while waiting for the sunset.

On to the next level of the observatory!

8 Feb 2023. Wednesday.

To go up to the 250m observatory we had to take these stairs. I believe the elevator goes up as well but I'm not 100% certain.

We made our way up and there were considerably less people up here.

To be fair there wasn't that many people on the 150m observatory but still.

Maybe one reason there's not that many people on this level is because of this very trippy-looking floor.

It looks a lot more exaggerated through the camera but in real life it was still quite trippy. I remembered the first time I saw that floor I almost tripped. 

This was the view from up here but it actually wasn't too different since obviously the angles are the same as the observatory below, just 100m higher. It's quite negligible when you're up this high already.

There was a theater room playing a video of Japanese history that thankfully had subtitles. There were plenty of seats there too so we could sit and rest our feet for a bit.

There was a section of the floor that was transparent and you could see all the way to the street floor 250m below. It was quite terrifying to be standing on the glass. 

Seems like this whole floor was fraught with danger even though I'm not that afraid of heights. 

It was quite cool to see the scaffolding from up here though since it curves outwards like the Eiffel Tower.

We could also see the football field we saw earlier from up here, and I think the view was less obstructed from up here.

At the very least there was basically no one else here so we could enjoy the views freely and enjoy the sunset from here.

Other than the views there wasn't much else on this level aside from a cafe. I didn't know the Tokyo Tower also had some anime mascots but I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

They had some usual snacks; nothing too special. I thought there would be some Tokyo Tower special snacks but there wasn't, sadly. 

Other than the cafe, there was just the elevator that goes down.

Apparently you can also take the stairs all the way down the tower, and I was quite tempted but since we were going to be walking more we decided not.

There was also this billboard showing a collab between Shining Detective Agency and Tokyo Tower.

I'm not really sure what it was at the time but I guess it's from a game franchise.

https://youtu.be/255UlEyLWlA

So we hung out a bit up here while waiting for the sunset.

We took a walk around the observatory and watched more of the video they were showing. At some point there was a music video as well.

Unfortunately I think the clouds were too heavy that day and was covering the sun, so unfortunately we couldn't enjoy the sunset.

It was still cool to see the lights coming on in the city though. That's one of my favourite parts of going up all these observatories - just seeing the city come alive at night. 

Looks like everyone's just going home from their work days. 

We tried to take some nice shots here as well.

It would definitely be quite difficult to get empty shots like these at the Tokyo Skytree since it's always so crowded.

After some last few pics we made our way back down using the elevator.

They played some nice soothing music as we made our way down the elevator but there wasn't much to see other than the elevator cables since it was getting quite dark out.

We left the Hollywood lobby area and went to explore the mall.

There was a much more extensive gift shop on the ground floor of the building, with lots of snacks and souvenirs.

I think this was the collab area but I'm not sure what you could get, maybe some exclusive merchandise?

There was also a pretty big seating area over here that I wasn't really expecting but there were quite a few young people, maybe for the collab?

There was also a special Animate store here, with a cute robot on display.

There was some Attack on Titan x Tokyo Tower merch that was quite cool!

There was also some other cool anime merchandise with the Tokyo skyline I was tempted to buy the poster.

There were also some caricature booths.

And some other small shops selling clothes and other souvenirs.

There was a statue for another mascot but I'm not sure who or what it was.

This shop had a lot of figurines for sale and these big Kirby plushies.

There was also a ninja store selling shuriken snacks!

They even showcased a ninja figure that looked absolutely amazing!

There was not much else in the mall that was particularly interesting so we left to get dinner.

But not before taking more photos! Now that the Tokyo Tower was all lit up it looked just like a red Eiffel Tower.

They also had this pergola with twinkly lights that looked so pretty!

We couldn't resist taking some photos here.

There was also a cafe near the pergola area that seemed to be in the same theme. 

There was also this red double-decker London bus that was just sitting there for some reason. 

We took a few more cool shots with the Tower before heading back to the station to go get some dinner!

I think the Tokyo Tower gets overlooked now since there's the Tokyo Skytree with a much bigger mall attached to it as well. But tbh I think it still looks really nice.

Here's the photo we tried recreate from our trip to Paris. The quality is not as good due to the darkness but we did the best we could. 

Anyway, I think that's gonna be all for today! Thanks so much for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

Check out my previous post in this series!

Towering Over Views🗼- TacoCat’s Travels #289 (Tokyo)

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