Ghibli Museum and Meeting a friend!

Today was a most perfect day, save the horrible pain in my feet and spine. I think I was unconsciously crouching at times, or it could be my bag dragging on my back.. I couldn’t really tell you the cause. It could be the combination of these things. Anyways I should start from the beginning instead of going backwards.

I woke up earlier than my clock again. It was a good thing because I must have been super draggy. I got out of the hotel just in the nick of time to start my journey. Also the trains were lagging behind today too. I got to the Ghibli Museum just after 10:30am. I think it was possibly 10:35am. I was almost crying to think I missed my window of opportunity, but the lady said it was okay! My ticket was for 10 am. Lucky they give you at least 30 mins window of opportunity.  I also had to que in a line to get my discount ticket for the bus… Sadly enough I threw in a train ticket that I paid too much on in the bin instead of the return stub for my roundtrip ghibli bus ticket.. So weird of me! Anyways it was incredible in there. My favorite is the bird and robot display. I won’t describe it because I don’t want to ruin anything for you. But it’s my favorite. I almost ate at the café there too, but I decided instead to use that for awesome souvenirs. I mean my meal would of cost as much as a figurine and a flip book. So I threw down some cash for ghibli items and ate some mickey d’s for dinner LOL. Yes I bought the 100Yen shake shake chicken, cheese flavor and a pie that had potato and bacon in it. It look just like an apple pie but not sweet.

See here for Ghibli momentos I got! I also sketched inside the museum. Though you couldn’t photograph, I don’t think they thought someone would try to draw things they saw in the museum.  And they didn’t, so I did it. I don’t know if you’ll be able to tell what I drew lol but here goes nothing.

Sketches forthcoming, under a spoiler tag.

Be advised the purikura sample pics are actually MintyMix's Flickr Photo.

On the bus back to the train station, I turned around and tried to gather courage to talk to the girl behind me. She was so awesome. I’m not sure if she’d want her real name here, so I’ll call her Judy. We struck up a conversation and I found out she was from Europe and could speak perfect English. I was very humbled, being that I can’t speak many languages  due to my insufficient memory. She definitely did not have a superior attitude and was so congenial. We decided to strike out together.  We went to Tokyu hands to look around. What a huge store, but we got hungry fast. Judy was very kind and even though she was starved, let me look at the craft section. Sadly I didn’t find my birabira metal strips for my Kanzashi ( Japanese Geisha Hairpins), but I did buy a book on decorative knots which I had looked for many a time in Korea and never found. A cursory glance of the basement said that everything was pretty much fresh prepared meals to take home or restaurants we couldn’t really afford. We struck outside for food. We found double luck. A picture place for teens. Those tiny cute sticker things called purikura? We did two. They were meant for 2 or more people, sheer  fact that you got lots of choices and then afterwards you could both color, stamp, write on the photos for mementos  and then afterwards we got 2 copies. That could be cut with little scissors that were placed at little tables. SO CUTE. I’m going to try and put some on facebook. Also putting up a sample. They aren’t our pictures just for privacy reasons, but just so you can see what Purkikura is. Anyways it was 400yen for each session, that gave you 2 prints for each person of all the photos you took. 12 altogether. Then we went right across the street to  a tiny place that had different foods. You just looked at what number you wanted and just inside was a ticket machine to get what you wanted and pay. We got curry rice. They had free water. So I suggest when looking for purikura, look for an arcade. Ours was above the arcade on the second floor. If you are small you can even rent a costume to wear for the purikura.

We went to find an internet café in Asakusa and indeed found Gera Gera which was manga/internet/more. It was about 290yen for 30mins. Then we braved the cold freezing rain looking about again.  We decided to go for karaoke and we didn’t have to look too far. I recognized the word in Japanese that said Karaoke, underneath that it said “ My pleasure” in English. It had English songs, but the staff did not speak English. We winged it and got to sing for an hour. We decided it was time to get ready to do our stuff. She going on a bus to Osaka and me getting back to my hostel. We were so sad to leave each other! If we go again I would love to go with ‘Judy’ again. She was a highlight in my whole trip. We were very personality compatible! And she is lucky with hostels too LOL. I hope we will travel again together!