Gaelec's Blog: October 30th (Tokyo)

Today we went to visit the "Ghibli Museum"in the city of Mitaka (30 minutes by train from Shinjuku). Studio Ghibli is an animated movie production house that produced some of my favorite animes like "Princess Mononoke", "Nausicaä of the valley of the wind", "My neighbor Totoro" and the Oscar winning "Spirited away". It's Japan's Disney.

To visit the museum, you have to buy the tickets in advance at specially designated stores for a specific date. We had bought ours before we left at a travel agency in Toronto. I think there's only one other distributor in Vancouver and that's it for Canada !

The museum is made for kids (and adults who still have an inner child :P). There are no set routes, only themed rooms that you can access by climbing spiraling staircases or going through small doors. It's just one big magical house that stimulates your imagination. You're not allowed to take pictures inside on the pretext that "the museum should be experienced through the eyes and not though the lens of a camera or camcorder. I would have loved to take pictures inside but I agree that my experience of the museum wouldn't have been the same.

From Trip to Japan

The only picture I took inside in the main entrance

From Trip to Japan

I took the opportunity to buy some Ghibli merchandise which is hard to find (and much more expensive) in Montreal. This visit has also been a strong moment of my trip.

We had a rendezvous around 6pm with a colleague from work named Guillaume that is renting an apartment in Tokyo for 1 month but we had a bit if time on our hands so we strolled through a park next to the museum as we made our way back to the train station. We also shopped a bit in Shinjuku in a couple of it's "depato" (department stores).

Tree near the park

From Trip to Japan

Shinjuku at night

From Trip to Japan

If you'd like to Bling something for a special occasion...

From Trip to Japan

We didn't have trouble finding Guillaume and we went to a kaiten-zushi in Shinjuku. The food was really good but there was a lot of weird dishes like crab brains and cod "uterus" filled with eggs. Nathalie ate the latter :S

After supper, we went to Guillaume's apartment building to drink some beers on the roof, hehe. One of his friends from Montreal and his girlfriend also joined us (the 3 are making the same trip and are living in the same building) and we talked about our experiences in Japan and other things.

We left not too late because we were taking the plane the next day and we thought we had to get up early (finally the plane was at 5pm). We also wanted to pack before we went to bed. So that's what we did and we also watched some Japanese TV and ended up going to bed around 1am.

In this I wanted to show the color of the ramp of the escalator. It's the same color as the train line. I was also sad to notice that it wasn't constant but I still think it's cool :)