Ghibli Museum and Harajuku

We both woke up crazy early this morning... Like, 3am ish, though we stayed in bed till 5am (so late, I know...). I think we'll have adjusted to the time change by tomorrow. The breakfast at the hotel restaurant was kind of expensive, so we went walking around to try and find a better choice. We had to wait for a place called Choco Cro (Chocolate Croissant) to open up, and it was well worth it. AMAZING chocolate croissant. It also helped me start to remember a little bit more Japanese, since the workers didn't really speak any English.After breakfast we decided to head straight over to Inokashira Park, where the Studio Ghibli Museum is located, to walk around until the museum opened. There were a ton of people walking their dogs (a lot of Akitas and Daschunds), and lots of bike riders.

The Ghibli Museum was AMAZING. There were stained glass depictions of all the main character around the building, and neat architectural designs everywhere. There was a room that featured a crazy clay zoetrope of some My Neighbor Totoro characters. SO COOL. There was an exhibit of a bunch of sketches and storyboards for various movies. There was a GIANT Cat bus that was for little kids to play on (Meghan and I were jealous). There was a garden area on the roof like Castle in the Sky, complete with giant robot. They don't let you take pictures inside, but we got some from the outside. Some very nice Japanese girls offered to take our picture with the robot:

Museum admission also includes a ticket to see a short film that as far as we know is only played at the museum. The current one is "Pan Dane to Tamago Hime" (Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess), and it was really cute.

After buying a few things at the gift shop (we were very tempted to buy EVERYTHING), we headed off to see if we could catch the Harajuku girls out near the station. Unfortunately we couldn't find them in time, though we did see a few examples walking down the main strip of shops. I didn't get any shots of them because some of them were wearing headphones and didn't look like they wanted to be disturbed and some of them I just didn't ask because it seemed awkward. We also kind of wanted to see the Rockabilly dancers in Yoyogi park, but the park was so huge, we didn't really feel like walking around the whole thing trying to find them.

We DID however go to Kiddy Land toy store, which had SO many toys. There was a floor dedicated to Hello Kitty and Snoopy, and a large section of Disney. We ended up buying a couple of Studio Ghibli handkerchiefs to carry around with us (there is an odd lack of paper towels or hand dryers around).

We went walking through some of the shopping area that Kiddy Land was in, where we bought a messenger bag to replace the Publix bag I was using as my carry on personal item. We tried to buy Meghan some Toms (shoes) but they only had up to size 8! Japanese women's feet are small, evidently.

We bought some delicious ramen in a shop where you purchase tickets in the vending machine outside to trade in for food inside. The dining situation was really awkward because you couldn't see the face of the person serving you on the other side of a wall, and so they also couldn't see that we weren't Japanese and kept speaking to us in fast Japanese. I did make it known that we needed English instructions (there was a customization sheet with various options) and eventually got our delicious food.

Though we got back to our hotel around 4:30 to rest, we haven't entirely decided whether to do anything too interesting this evening. Our feet are killing us, and we're still pretty tired from the time change... We'll probably just venture out to get some sushi and then come back, finish packing for the travel to Osaka, and pass out.

Photo Album from Today