One does not simply fly from Denver to Taipei… because there are no direct flights. So this year we decided to fly from Denver to Tokyo first, and then, after a few days, move on to Taipei. My wife is the only one among the three of us who has ever been to Japan.
We spent a few days in Tokyo first, visiting places like the National Museum of Nature and Science and the Railway Museum. Travel like this is still a little tough for O. At six years old, he still has little tolerance for boredom, so traveling between activities or waiting for a table at a restaurant are challenging. It’s not as bad the last time, when he was just shy of four, but there is still a lot of work trying to keep him entertained or working with him to learn to manage boredom and disappointment. I guess this is growing up.
I realized too late that part of my mistake was not bringing stuff for O to do while we moved around and waited. Back home when we take the bus, he’s usually absorbed in watching the traffic and doesn’t need anything to do as we travel. We also only go once every month or two. It’s very different for him at this age to spend a quarter of his day every day riding around on public transit — even if he does enjoy riding the subway — just to get somewhere fun or find something to eat. It is good for him to practice dealing with these emotions. If he’s perpetually entertained for his entire childhood, he’ll never learn to deal with boredom, or frustration. But practicing with these emotions does not make for a fun and relaxing vacation for anyone involved.
Our last day in Tokyo, we ended up at the Maxell Aqua Park, which I cannot really recommend. I didn’t think it was such a great aquarium, but we did get see this super smooth black tip reef shark — a first for us. More than that, though, I’m pretty uncomfortable with the live animal shows they have there. Forcing these captive animals to perform tricks for an audience of humans just doesn’t feel good.
I loved Tokyo’s streets. Even when there were no sidewalks I felt safe walking on them (unlike in Taipei). We had to spend very little time walking along major roads with heavy traffic. Most of the time we were on small streets with few (if any) cars, where speeds were generally pretty low and drivers deferred to pedestrians and cyclists.
We had some great food in Tokyo, too. It takes a little work to find vegan food, but it is possible. Fortunately, one of my wife’s hobbies is looking at food videos on Instagram and bookmarking places at which she wants to eat, so we came with a list of vegan places to try. We had to plan a little carefully where we were going and when to make sure we could get to a restaurant with vegan food, but it was possible. It helped that Z speaks and reads enough Japanese that in a pinch, we could get some rice balls from a convenience store and be pretty confident they didn’t contain surprise fish flakes or anything (assuming that all of that stuff is disclosed in the ingredients).
We took the Shinkansen (!!!) from Tokyo to Nagoya. In my opinion, for traveling long distances, you can’t beat high speed rail. We had two destinations in mind in Nagoya: Legoland and Ghibli Park. Legoland was, without a doubt, the highlight for O. He loves Legos, and he was in heaven here. We decided to stay at the Legoland hotel for a treat, and no sooner did we enter the hotel lobby than he was in the Lego pit building vehicles.
The only downside of Legoland for me was how much it seemed geared towards selling us more Lego. I am often cynical, even so I did not expect to be always dumped into a gift shop where I can buy the same Lego sets that we can buy in the Lego store back home immediately after every attraction.
I was expecting maybe a few more rides, a few more things to see. So part of this visit turned into helping O (have I mentioned he’s only six) manage his emotions around the disappointment of wanting All the Toys and not getting them. I do not think we handled it well, since we did get him a new set that is, I believe, unique to Legoland — a Lego version of the one ride he rode there: a car driving track.
My favorite part was easily Miniland. It was just some incredibly detailed Lego sculptures of cities and towns — often real buildings. I would discover a few days later that the weird looking building with a sphere suspended between two skyscrapers was actually the science museum in Nagoya; the sphere houses the planetarium. The colors of the Legos are all faded from being out in the weather. Somehow that just adds to its charm.
Next up: Ghibli Park. This was a tough one for O because it was a lot of walking. But for me, Ghibli Park is wonderful because it is laid out a bit more like a “green space” kind of park than an amusement kind of park. I found it quite peaceful.
Different areas in the park have re-creations of places from various Ghibli movies, so we got to wander around the Kusakabe’s house from My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s house from Kiki’s Delivery Service. Kiki’s mom’s potion room (the room behind all six of those windows at the front of the house) was packed with drying herbs hanging from the ceiling, it was exquisitely put together; my wife and I both want a room like that at home, it was so cozy.
We saw Howl’s castle from a distance (the line was a bit long to go in). I could have happily wandered around the park all day despite the heat.
We ended our time in Nagoya (and Japan) at the science museum in Nagoya. Here O went to his first ever planetarium show, which neither he nor I really understood because it was in Japanese, but which we both enjoyed because the stars are beautiful. Outside the museum, we discovered a couple of old train cars, trams, and locomotives (which you may also notice are included in the Miniland re-creation of the museum, along with the rocket they keep outside). It seemed to this foreigner like there were museums and tributes to rail travel all over Japan, which I (of course) greatly enjoyed.
Afterwards we returned to Tokyo by Shinkansen to catch our flight to Taipei the next day. On the way we passed by the Nitto factory (Nitto makes bike parts), and the Fujifilm factory, and we saw the base of Mt. Fuji, but the rest of the mountain was shrouded in fog (we would catch a glimpse from the plane the next day, but I did not have my camera ready).
