Yesterday felt like a gift of a day. We really didn’t have much on the agenda that we had to do, so we just took our time wandering around the city. So often, traveling devolves into a list of things you have to see and not quite enough time to see it all. And so you dash from place to place as efficiently as possible.

And I truly believe that in by dashing, you lose the soul of the place. Yesterday we had some extra time and decided to go find a park and playground nearby. I turned the phone over to Amelia and let her navigate us to the park. I kept wanting to take control back, but I bit my tongue. We were in a safe place, with no time constraints, so had the freedom to wander off track for a while and see what we could see. Amelia could get a feel for finding her way in a new place. It was an oddly luxurious feeling. And it also reminded me how it must feel for the kids – these mingled feelings of curiosity about where we were and lack of control…

We ended up at a teeny park in the middle of the tight urban fabric of Tokyo near Skytree. This park was astounding…. It has a convex mirror facing Tokyo’s Skytree Tower that creates the illusion of a road running up to the top of the tower. And it has a two-story roller slide!

It was a rainy, soggy day, so the kids got their pants soaked when they went down it. But there was no way that we could discover something like that and not let the kids go down it. It was a crazy slide! They went down over and over. And I marveled at this quirky playground. So close to the major tourist attraction of Skytree.

These are the kinds of travel experiences that I treasure. The formula goes something like this: put yourself on the beaten tourist path. Then make a let turn. And then make another left turn. Wherever you end up almost always seems more true to the unique spirit of wherever you are. The tourist destinations are usually destinations for a reason, and I do think everyone should go. (Could you imagine going to NYC and not seeing the Statue of Liberty?). But they also usually have all their quirky edges sanded off.

After we played for a bit, we wandered back over to Skytree and visited the Sumida Aquarium. My expectations were low (It is, after all, an aquarium in the middle of a shopping mall), but we had so much fun. They have an excellent jellyfish section with a pool of moon jellyfish that you can look down on (and so you’re not looking through plexiglass to see them). And they have a section with about 50 penguins. They were frolicking through the water and diving and wrestling and having fun. They were celebrating their spotted garden eels with activities and paper hats. And they have about four seals. We watched as they took one of the seals out on a parade through the rest of the aquarium. We kept saying that we were gonna go, and kept getting sucked into just one more exhibit.

After that we did a little shopping for some Pokemon and Animal Crossing necessities and made our way back to the room to meet up with Tim. One of his cousins traveled all the way across the city to meet up with us for a dinner of Monjayaki and Okonomiyaki.

We had a fabulous day…. I’ll try to post pictures here later…