The Quest for Studio Ghibli

This morning got off to a slow start, and Harusa took me to a cute Japanese cafe down the street for lunch. I'm not feeling too jetlagged, seeing as I was out of bed by 9 or 10 and was hungry for lunch at noon. I think I'm doing a-ok!

After lunch, I set off on my quest for the Ghibli Museum. Between trains, subways, buses, and transfers, it's only 45 minutes away. It took me an hour and a half to get there. The public transportation system here is difficult for many reasons. There are multiple companies running all the train lines; this means that none of them produce a map of all the train/subway stations. Doing so would be advertising for the competitor. Then, it's really difficult to tell which stations are subway and which are train. The really big stations aren't labeled well enough to even find the platforms most of the time. This results in a lot of trial-and-error searching and is ultimately the most frustrating part. Oh yeah, and everything's in Japanese! I finally wised up and got an English and Japanese map of Tokyo and Shinjuku stations (the biggest ones). Now I walk around like Tom Hanks in Terminal, sounding out the station on the English map and then playing a weird matching game with the Japanese map!

Eventually, I made it to the Ghibli Museum. The museum is for the work of animation artist Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, etc.) It's a really amazing museum, designed mostly for kids. Its theme is "let's lose our way together."

Not just the exhibits, but even the building itself is a work of art. If you've ever seen the Dali museum in Spain, it's like that but with cute cartoons instead of Dali's distorted images. I also got to see a 10-minute short film by Miyazaki. It was my favorite part! It was a cartoon about an underwater spider who falls in love with a water skier on the surface. The best part was that there was no speaking, so I had no trouble following the plot! The museum only had a few things in English - signs for the toilet, the exit, and a paragraph in the information book. A few of the workers said some things in English to me, but I usually couldn't understand them. I'm amazed at how well I've gotten along so far with the language barrier. It's been challenging, but I'm still at it!

My ride back to Harusa's proved my learning curve: I made it in an hour! We took it easy all evening and wrapped up the day with a trip to an Internet cafe and the best meal I've had so far. It was Udon soup (thick noodles) and tempura (fried things to dunk in the soup - I chose veggies and sweet potato). Yum!