Japan Day 2

First thing, we went and had breakfast at a crazy "american-style" place that mostly sold pie (canned fruit salad pie anyone?), but also had pancakes. Funny.

We headed out to Mitaka station to get to the Ghibli Museum. I had purchased reservations for tickets a long time ago. I guess they limit the amount of people allowed inside during each day, so we purchased the ticket reservations for a specific day. We walked through a park from the station to get there, got a little lost, but managed to get photos of the Totoro sign posts along the way. Very fun.

The museum is awesome. The displays are very cool. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in Hayao Miyazaki's work, or animation in general. The building is fantastic and I loved it. We also got to see a short that was produced only for the museum, and there was a giant display about the new movie, "Ponyo by the cliffs by the sea." Loved it! No photos allowed inside though, so you'll have to make do with outdoor photos.

We walked back through another part of the park and I got eaten alive by bugs. Seriously. I ended up with over 12 giant bites on my legs. Outrageous behavior, I tell you. We went to another park that had a pond, carp, ducks, a shrine and a (closed) zoo on one side. It was very pretty.

We got back to Shinegawa station and had sushi, which was yum. Brian and I got a very odd little appetizer as well. It was served almost cold, and had a texture like a custard or soft boiled egg. There were mushrooms, green onion, potatoes and other items in the bottom. I didn't really care for it, as the texture was off for me... but the flavor was nice. Our sushi came with miso and we also had several beers. I see know why the Japanese have these very light, almost (to me) flavorless beers. It is just too freaking hot to drink anything heavier. Dinner was lovely, our waitress was entertaining (very wee little old lady, who was training a new server boy). She would RUN everywhere and was very severe with the trainee.

That was it for the day. A good first day out in Japan, though.