GHIBLI MUSEUM!

Day three in Tokyo.

We grabbed a quick bite for breakfast from a Maccy D's near our hotel on the way to the train station. MISTAKE! I got a shaka shaka chicken. Which is a chicken fillet (yum) with a packet of mysterious powder. I assumed the powder was to go on the chicken, which is was, unfortunately it was the most pungent spicy garlic powder you can imagine. It made me feel ill and my fingers smelt like a sewer most of the day! What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger (and stinkier) I suppose :(

We were especially excited on our way to Mitaka because we were going to the Studio Ghibli museum! (the best maker of anime films) We aimed to get there for 10am when it opened like excited kiddies, but being severely jetlagged teenagers, we slept through our alarm and got to the museum at 12:30...

Even though the policy is; you have to buy your tickets 3 months in advance to help the museum stay "crowd free" it was most definately not "crowd free"...but it was amazing. Very amazing. And we got actual bits of film from the original movies in our tickets! Yatah!

We then tried to get to Inokashira Park in Kichi-Joji, supposedly nearby and very picturesque. If this trip has taught us anything, it's that we have serious map-reading issues. My duke of Edinburgh Bronze awarding is proving to be WORTHLESS! So we stopped to ask some Japanese women, forgetting that most Japanese people speak excellent english. We gestured and mimed that we wanted to get to Inokashira park and she politely gave us directions, told us about nearby interesting sightseeing opportunities and offered to show us around. Embarassing.

The park and Kichi-Joji proved to be as lovely as expected. We walked around the shrines, then rode a bright pink, pimped out pedal boat around the small lake for a while. It was lush :)

In the evening we went over to Shinjuku, the home to Tokyo's thriving red-light district as well as many famous shopping centres. We were searching fervently for one of the best Ramen shops in Japan following the guidebook. As you already know, our mapreading skills leave a lot to be desired, needless to say, we never found the Ramen shop. We read the map logically, placing ourselves using landmarks and bearings and if there was any sense to it, we would have ended up exactly where we wanted to be. Except we seem to end up anywhere but where we want to be. This leads us to believe it's the maps we're using that are wrong. All of them...

We ended up eating at a little empty Chinese restaurant, down some stairs in a side street. The man who ran it looked a bit like a Yakuza. I ordered spicy pork noodles except instead of chunks of pork in my bowl, there were chunks of tofu with slime all over them and they tasted like fish. Shahreena got chicken noodles which was noodles in water with near-raw chicken strips on top. It was accompanied with fried rice that tasted like cake and brown water that tasted like rice whiskey...
The portions were a bit massive and the noodles might as well have been served in a bucket instead of a bowl. So we forced down as much as we could then paid and legged it...

We got back to the hotel about 8pm and decided to watch a movie in the hotel cinema. We watched the Dragonball movie. If you were thinking to, don't. They haven't invented a word to describe it's cheesiness.

Well, we're off to the central disctict to see a statue of Godzilla now. Bye!