Mia-tachi no tabi - Day 20 - Whimsical Fantasy

Today we only had one thing on our plate: the Ghibli museum. So we spent the morning lounging around reading. We finally pried ourselfs up around 12:30 to set off to make our 2 :00 entrance time. It was a 20 minute walk to Shinjuku station, then. 17 minute train ride, then a 20 minute walk to the museum. The walk was nice though, as most of it was along a big shady park.

We arrived a little early, but they still let us in. The building is really charming.

Most of the displays are interactive, so don't make much sense to photograph, so I didn't take too many pictures. But here are some shots of the buildings interior.

The first floor had a room with a bunch of cool stop motion types of displays and a little movie theater. The second floor had a study that I assume is supposed to be modeled after Hayao Miyazaki's and it was amazingly detailed. It also had a room with a bunch of little booths with different types of ways to view things. So one had a periscope you used to find little fuzz balls in the trees, another had a telescope used to look at a house, and the one that took us longest to figure out was the pinhole camera. You pointed the pinhole at something and viewed it from the top.

The third floor had the catbus (limited to children) and the gift shop, which was cute and insanely crowded. 

Finally, the roof had a kind of garden with this guy:

After viewing everything, we went back down for th movie. Our movie tickets are really cool, since they are made out of film strips from Ghibli films. I was thinking about refusing to see the movie if we didn't get to keep them, but they don't take the tickets, just stamp them, which is good, since the movie was probably my favorite part. It was all in Japanese, but I understood most of it, though I am sure the finer details escaped me. It was only 16 minutes long. It was called "Hoshi o Katta Hi" or "The Day I Bought a Star". 

What is funn is that while in line I was looking at a poster that showed three of the shorts they show (it changes every month) and I wanted to see this one, but didn't think the chances of it being shown were very high. So yay!

As the title says, this is about a boy who buys a star. He runs away from home and is taken in by a kind lady who let's him stay in a shed in her yard and work in the garden. One day when taking his harvest to market, he runs into two strange peddlers who offer to trade him a seed of a star for his load. He agrees and takes the seed home and plants it. The next morning a little planet has grown with three little moons. Another harvest allows him to buy a spray bottle to water it with, and it develops clouds and storms, and the next day, an ocean had been born. But soon his parents come for him and he leaves his star with Ninya as he returns home. But soon he is picked up by the peddlers who sold him the star and taken back to Ninya so he can harvest his star and set it afloat in the galaxy where it will need 60 years to finish growing before he can return to it. So until then he has to return home. (The end is the part I am fuzziest on).

After the museum we went is search of lunch/dinner. We found a scetchy looking restraunt that the internet told us had tempura, but they didn't. Sadly, we didn't learn this until after ordering drinks, so we had to finish those before leaving. And then they wanted to charge us 730 for the cabbag they had brought us and we hadn't touched. We refused and they backed down to 230. We refused and they backed down entirely. So the next restraunt we chose was the one I had found tonight before in Shinjuku on tripadvisor which had lots of reviews that proved it had tempura. It was really cute and tasty.

After dinner we went to the Takano Fruit Parlor Cafe for parfaits  the final item on my food list for Japan. It was a very ritzy feeling place. The parfaits were very pretty:

Mom got mango while Rich and I got chocolate. They were all tasty, though sadly there was a layer of shaved ice in the mango my mom didn't care for. But it had a really nice mango flavor and lots of fresh mango. The chocolate had chunks of truffles on the top and banana at the bottom. I have added parfaits to my list of things I need to try to make at home.

Then we returned to the hotel and played bridge until 11:30 when I put a stop to it so as to not mess up the next day's sleeping schedule.

And thus our glorious journey came to an end. Tomorrow we fly home, which isn't really worth recording, so I won't. Bye!