travels with pem: 24hrs in Tokyo / Goodbye Japan.

So I didn't do that much the past day and a half - I'm heading to the airport right now, so I'll recount what happened since we last talked.

I went into Harajuku again to catch a glimpse of the elusive cosplayers. Turns out, these are kids who go to school. And I thought it was like Portland on any weekday near downtown. :-(

So instead, I went to see the Meiji Jingu, a place I was going to see on Tokyo round 1, but opted for food instead and when I couldn't find food, opted for Starbucks.

The largest wooden Torii in Japan. I think they qualified it with wooden to get the "largest". But that's nit-picking.

My photo with two older Japanese gentleman who were kind enough to pose.

I know all about these Sake barrels thanks to Okamé!!!

So about this time, I needed to get close to the Ghibli museum, which is in Mitaka far out from the center of Tokyo. My light early lunch didn't do much, so I went to this cool cafe about 1.4km from the museum.

Awesome! On the 2F, the pictures from their website makes the store seem much larger than it actually is. In America, we definitely don't want for space.

I got the chikn sandwich and added avocado. Oh how I miss the avocado in Osaka. The sauce was very weird. Like it wanted to be a barbecue sauce, but then changed its mind and went to curry, then halfway, it stopped. I think I tasted cinnamon in it. Weird.

I don't know why I thought this sign was funny - I mean, there are a ton of signs in English, which is not the native language. But something about cats and dogs. En español.

I make it to the museum which is AMAZINGLY architected. They didn't allow photos inside, I took a couple and got reprimanded, so those will be in my personal photo album of shame along with my 8th grade school picture with the perm.

Er, maybe I should have zoomed in. The sign is super cute, like everything else in this museum.

Me and Totoro!!

So I spent about an hour in the museum - there was a short film, introduced by a lady completely in Japanese, a lot of different exhibits, and a nice cafe and gift store. In the exhibit category, they had a super awesome animation area where they showed a number of models made from stills, then with a 30fps light strobe, made the models look animated. This is where I first got reprimanded.

Later, I looked in the pamphlet and saw that rule 1 for the Ghibli Museum is No Photographs in the Ghibli Museum.

I got a couple slides as a token for entry to the museum. No, it actually was just bubbles or something non-descript like that. Nothing cool.