One day in Tokyo

Started the day bright and early at...... 5:30am. Both Joyce and I just couldn't sleep anymore due to time difference and just gave up on trying to sleep anymore.

The breakfast buffet at the hotel was 1,300 yen.... so we decided to go with the breakfast of champions. All the leftover food we gathered from the flight.

Yeah, it's a little sad, but oh well. At least we're full! Kinda.

And our hero of the day is.... Febreeze from the hotel. Because we didn't get to have our luggage, we had to rewear our clothes and they smell! So we sprayed a lot of Febreeze on our clothes so that others don't have to suffer because of us.

First mission in Japan is to go to Joyce's bank in Tokyo and close the account. We got to the subway station early and bought our ticket to go.

Bought some water as well..... their cap is really interesting! It's designed so that you don't take it off... in case you lose it!

On the way out of Narita, we went through a rice paddy... very pretty.

When we finally got into Tokyo, it pretty much took us 30 minutes to find the bank that was supposed to be 10 minutes walking distance from the subway exit -_-. This is what happens when your phone's GPS doesn't work properly anymore :(

Once that's done, it's time to set out for Mitaka, where the Ghibli Museum is.

When we got to the Mitaka station, we were very hungry, and there was a lot of nice shops selling food.... so we got some to try.

This was a fried bean curd roll with shrimp, water chestnut, and bamboo shoots inside. It was very good!

We also got some mini taiyaki from this man.

It was not very good :(

It tasted more like a croissant with very little filling than anything else. Bleh.

Along the way, from Sherry's recommendation, I also tried the onsen egg from 7-eleven and this grape ice thing.

The onsen egg was.... ok. I had to crack open the egg shell against the wall and couldn't really peel off the shell because it was soooo soft. So I ended up just sucking the whole thing out of its shell...

And this grape ice thing.... I think it's ok, maybe it's just not my type of food. It tasted like the gummy that you find at the super market..

But apparently, this grape ice is popular enough that they also have a KitKat version!

So walking towards the Ghibli Museum, you pass through many different parks and a nicely designed neighborhood. If it weren't for the time crunch and bad weather, I would have stayed in this city longer to bike around or explore the area. It's really quite nice!

Along the way, there were many signs and buses for the Ghibli Museum.

There was a lot of people at the museum today despite the rain (apparently, the rain was really bad for Japan today... a lot of mudslide and all that). Because we couldn't take pictures inside the museum, I'll just describe a bit of what we saw.

First, you go through the main entrance and you see this museum that looks like a castle.

(ugh, I need to lose weight when I go back home)

Once you go in, they give you these little film strips as tickets to enter the small short film theater. The short film this time is a bug's life. It's really a strange short film. It documents how the bug (or really a worm) saw the world... but the whole thing has no dialogue and only one guy is making sound effect into the microphone for everything.

Inside the museum, you have rooms where they show you how an animation is developed from concept, to painting, to recording it on film, to finishing. It's really amazing how they used to draw animation FRAME BY FRAME. It really gave me a new appreciation for his artwork. There was also a team or artists who drew and colored everything together in an assembly line-like fashion.

The new exhibit this time is the food in all his work. They have the fake food replica of some of the more famous dishes... like Kiki's chocolate cake, all the buffet in Spirited Away that turned the parents into pigs, half egg sandwich from Castle in the Sky, and soooo many others. It was quite incredible.

There was also a spiral staircase that went from 1st floor to 3rd floor (inside), and then another set (outside) to go to the roof. It was quite claustrophobic for me and wayyy too high!

Up on the roof, there is the iron giant from Castle in the Sky. Umm... I guess I really haven't seen the film.

After finishing walking around the museum, we went to the souvenir store and unfortunately, everything was sooooo expensive that we didn't buy anything. It's quite interesting how this museum is mostly about the artwork and appreciation of the artwork of Miyazaki than trying to sell products. In the souvenir shop, there really wasn't any sale of the films, plushes, and things of that sort that you would see elsewhere. There were t-shirts that cost $600(!), small magnets and pins, postcards... but all very overpriced.

We finished the museum tour with the cafe... which was gonna be one hour wait! So we opted for the better option of getting the ice cream next to the cafe.

That was a milk ice cream with lemon ice cream.

I don't know if you can see it... but there is a translucent part of the ice cream, which is that lemonade part, and the milk ice cream is basically made with milk, so it melts really quickly!

Last stop is to find the fountain pen for Ritchie. He said it's called Inkstand, which was not too far from Tokyo... but we didn't expect the entire shop to be just a shop dedicated to ink color!!

I got the fine pen for him... hopefully that's the one he wanted!

And then it's finally time to fly to Incheon to check whether our luggages were intact! We got our in-flight meal that mostly tasted weird to me....

...and then got to Incheon... and found our luggages! Yay!! Yay for fresh clothes!

We are now staying at Crown Hotel near the airport since we got out of the airport at 12am... but the hotel was super efficient that he got me checked in before I arrived and gave me the key once I got off the shuttle!

And the hotel is super nice!

It even has a washing machine!

Alright, I'm starting to become incoherent... it's time to sleep now, at 1:45am. Ah so tired!!