Okay here's another long one! Sorry for the massive delay, I have no idea how I kept up with these so regularly in Korea but it's probably because I never let them build up on me like I did in Japan (since I had less time there and spent more running around -.-).
Anyways! On to one of my more epic days in Tokyo, which included the famous GHIBLI MUSEUM!!! Which I've pretty much been dreaming of going to since I was a wee little Asian baby and saw my first Miyazaki film. And watched every single one ever made at least 20 times since then. No really. They are magical and extraordinarily addicting! If you do not watch them, I highly recommend them. (And secretly judge you for having never watched one...SERIOUSLY?!?!).
I got new earrings in Harajuku the other day, which were a cute Alice in Wonderland throwback with the white rabbit and club symbol. And no Mom those are not real safety pins lol, they are earrings too. I met Julia for an early lunch at Kichijoji to go eat tsukemen, something I had wanted to try for ages. She took me to her favorite place, which was a small shop located near the subway. It was tiny but SUPER popular and famous apparently. It had been in all sorts of magazines and articles and there was this gigantic line snaking out from the front. People are seriously willing to wait for days to get in apparently lol. We arrived before it had even opened so we joined the line and waited a bit until we could go in and order with the coin machine :)
Anyways! On to one of my more epic days in Tokyo, which included the famous GHIBLI MUSEUM!!! Which I've pretty much been dreaming of going to since I was a wee little Asian baby and saw my first Miyazaki film. And watched every single one ever made at least 20 times since then. No really. They are magical and extraordinarily addicting! If you do not watch them, I highly recommend them. (And secretly judge you for having never watched one...SERIOUSLY?!?!).
I got new earrings in Harajuku the other day, which were a cute Alice in Wonderland throwback with the white rabbit and club symbol. And no Mom those are not real safety pins lol, they are earrings too. I met Julia for an early lunch at Kichijoji to go eat tsukemen, something I had wanted to try for ages. She took me to her favorite place, which was a small shop located near the subway. It was tiny but SUPER popular and famous apparently. It had been in all sorts of magazines and articles and there was this gigantic line snaking out from the front. People are seriously willing to wait for days to get in apparently lol. We arrived before it had even opened so we joined the line and waited a bit until we could go in and order with the coin machine :)
OMG IT WAS SO EPIC. It's hard to believe because of all the fantastically delicious food I've had here in Japan, but this tsukemen may have just replaced all others as my new favorite Japanese food. Even over udon and salmon sashimi...WHICH MEANS ITS INTENSE. Like my friend Takara said, there's just no real words for describing how ridiculously delicious this food is; it just makes your stomach light up with fireworks and do the freaking samba up in there.
Also ironic was that I ate this tsukemen on Thanksgiving Day, and this was probably the closest thing I could get in the Japanese food range to turkey and gravy :D I dipped my pork slices in the savoryomgdelicious broth/gravy (it was somewhere between, too thick for a broth but too thin for a gravy). After you eat all your noodles and have some broth/gravy left, you poor in some broth base from the metal containers pictured above and then sip it like a soup. THEN it is really a broth :)
Also ironic was that I ate this tsukemen on Thanksgiving Day, and this was probably the closest thing I could get in the Japanese food range to turkey and gravy :D I dipped my pork slices in the savoryomgdelicious broth/gravy (it was somewhere between, too thick for a broth but too thin for a gravy). After you eat all your noodles and have some broth/gravy left, you poor in some broth base from the metal containers pictured above and then sip it like a soup. THEN it is really a broth :)
After our early lunch we headed to the place of my childhood dreams...THE GHIBLI MUSEUM!! It was everything I had expected it to be AND MORE. No seriously, I was practically having spasms I was so excited. Poor Julia had to deal with me hyperventilating as soon as we entered hahah. We got our tickets and cool ticket passes for our free short film screening. They all had different photo stills from Ponyo it looked like. Or at least mine was, I recognized the boy and girl. We couldn't figure out what Julia's was from lol, it was just like a foot and the bottom of a dress...
The inside of the museum was just awesome in design and so whimsical and otherworld-looking. We weren't supposed to take pictures once inside but I mean, I couldn't resist. This is a once in a lifetime experience for me and something I've been anticipating for so long! I'm halfway across the world from my home and I wanted something more than a fleeting memory to take back with me about this wonderful place. So I formally apologize to the Ghibli Museum and staff for breaking their rules, but I have no regrets lol. Everytime I look at them I feel happy inside :D
The inside of the museum was just awesome in design and so whimsical and otherworld-looking. We weren't supposed to take pictures once inside but I mean, I couldn't resist. This is a once in a lifetime experience for me and something I've been anticipating for so long! I'm halfway across the world from my home and I wanted something more than a fleeting memory to take back with me about this wonderful place. So I formally apologize to the Ghibli Museum and staff for breaking their rules, but I have no regrets lol. Everytime I look at them I feel happy inside :D
Top photos: The left are pages from his hand-drawn and colored stills from Kiki's Delivery Service and the right is a page from the giant booklets that composed the entire movie of Howl's Moving Castle. I read that entire one, Howl's is my absolute favorite next to Spirited Away. There are their dialogue lines written in on the right of each frame, along with how many seconds each frame is to be shown for and other scene specifications. - Bottom photos: Adorable door and wallpaper and the ceiling of the short film movie theater we sat in. It's styled like the big baby's room in Spirited Away!!! I was so excited hahah, it was like sitting in an actual scene from the movie.
Just moving around throughout the levels of the museum (there were like four I think, plus you could walk out on a balcony and take another stairset up to the roof where there was more stuff!) was so much fun and unique. There were narrow birdcage-looking staircases that wound up for several floors, glass space-age looking elevators with Miyazaki movie accents, and mini child-sized archways to duck through like a jungle gym :) There was one floor entirely dedicated to Miyazaki's desks where he actually penned out the movies and painted in colors for sample stills. I was just like in shock, gaping open-mouthed at the messy overflowing desks and actual hand-drawn movie frames. It was too much lol. I REVERE Hayao Miyazaki and bow down to my favorite films of his, so this was like meeting an old friend and seeing my favorite characters being born, simultaenously.
Like I mentioned, there was a spiraling staircase to take up to the top of the museum out in the open. There is lots of greenery and plants, in accordance with Miyazaki's great love of nature and focus on the environment. The design and architecture of the whole area was really quirky as well, with bright colors and unique building designs.
On top there were statues of prominent Castle in the Sky figures that I fangirl-ed all over before composing myself for pictures haha. They were so real and HERE; it was like physically touching something that you only thought existed in your imagination. It was magical. I can't even imagine how mind-boggling this would have been for me if I was still a kid and couldn't comprehend how this was happening haha.
We made a stop in the gift shop where I happily absorbed all the Miyazaki movie stuff all around me. I bought some embroidered hand cloths (Totoro and Kiki's), a Totoro keychain and pin, and some stickers and postcards with scenes from my favorite movies.
We took a different way in so we didn't see Totoro in the ticket office until we exited the museum :) How awesome is he. I really liked the atmosphere the museum grounds gave off, almost like you were half in a dream and anything could happen at any time. In the above photo, its all solid, classical built, and bright on the left then slowly morphs into a more disorganized and mystical kind of environment on the right.
We took a donut break at Mister Donut before heading to what is known as The Loft. It had a bunch of stores and a GIANT arcade underground. Dude. Japanese arcades KICK THE BUTTS of our American arcades. Our wimpy little things don't deserve to be called arcades. This was MASSIVE. Crane game machines twice as tall as me and just as wide, rows and rows of racing, shooting, singing, and dancing games, and a huge area set aside for extremely high-tech purikura booths, with music blasting and lights flashing everywhere. It was so awesome o.o My inner gaming nerd was screaming running around with fistfuls of change already.
This was my first experience with purikura myself, but I had seen purikura pictures before. In America, they are usually tiny little grainy photos with weird graphics and stuff. Here in Japan, the machines are so ridiculously high-tech and fancy that it's essentially a modeling booth. There are lines on the floor for where to stand and a green screen behind you. You walk out of the booth to a separate area attached to the booth to draw, write, design, and pick backgrounds/stickers for your photos too.
It was so much fun!!! I had never done it before so I didn't really know what to do besides smile, but I tapped into my inner Asian and it worked out fine :D This particular machine was even new for Julia and it compiled a bunch of our full-body pictures into a magazine-cover looking photo along with separate full-body pictures of us. We didn't even know what it was doing until the very end when it flashed on screen with all the photos, it takes these pictures at RAPID-FIRE SPEED. Like we just see the countdown and have about 2 seconds to smile/pose/move (x.x)
It was so much fun!!! I had never done it before so I didn't really know what to do besides smile, but I tapped into my inner Asian and it worked out fine :D This particular machine was even new for Julia and it compiled a bunch of our full-body pictures into a magazine-cover looking photo along with separate full-body pictures of us. We didn't even know what it was doing until the very end when it flashed on screen with all the photos, it takes these pictures at RAPID-FIRE SPEED. Like we just see the countdown and have about 2 seconds to smile/pose/move (x.x)
After purikura was dinner and drinks with Hatsue joining us!! We went to another izakaya, a fancier one than last time. We took off our shoes and placed them in cool lockers, then entered our own private little room to be served in. I officially LOVE izakayas in Japan, there is the hugest menu EVER of all sorts of delicious foods and drinks (Seriously. Anything you can think of, it's there, dead cheap, and probably comes in 3 different flavors). Everything on izakaya menus is generally one cheap price with a few exceptions. Here everything was 280 yen I think (about $3.40), for food and drinks. We LOADED UP. We had different sashimis, grilled beef and scallop dishes, sweet miso tofu sticks, omurice with noodles inside, shoyu-fried onigiri, potato cheese balls, fried fish roe potato cake things, tempura-ed edamame, and so much more.
-Side note: Japan seriously has the best toilets ever. They are so smart. I already wrote about the sinks on them, auto flushing, warming seats, and streams of water that wash you but this toilet at the izakaya was so smart, IT OPENED IT'S LID FOR ME WHEN I ENTERED THE STALL. I just stared at it open-mouthed like it had just sprouted heads or something before I regained my senses. It's like the toilets are alive and gonna start chatting to me about my day while I take a pee...
-Side note: Japan seriously has the best toilets ever. They are so smart. I already wrote about the sinks on them, auto flushing, warming seats, and streams of water that wash you but this toilet at the izakaya was so smart, IT OPENED IT'S LID FOR ME WHEN I ENTERED THE STALL. I just stared at it open-mouthed like it had just sprouted heads or something before I regained my senses. It's like the toilets are alive and gonna start chatting to me about my day while I take a pee...
The drinks were so delicious they almost topped the food (they only lost out to the food because we ate so many more dishes compared to drinks...which we still got through a fair amount haha). I love the attitude towards drinking in Korea and Japan. It's more social and relaxed than any kind in the US. The drinks aren't very strong (unless you order more straight hard alcohol kind of stuff obviously), so it's all a communal kind of thing, drinking. The drinks are so pretty and appetizing looking too, it's an art in itself. I lost track of all the drinks I had but I know they included a mango milk with fresh sliced mango, a sparkling strawberry drink with crushed strawberries, a mango calpis sour with iced mango pieces, and a strawberry milk with diced strawberries (do you see a pattern in my favorite drink flavors here? Haha the fresh fruit in them was a dessert in itself!). We talked and ate and drank until late, before I returned full and sleepy to my hotel for the night :)