My Neighbor Ghibli.

Yesterday morning - finally! - we went to the Ghibli museum (Hayao Miyazaki's studio museum). It was an easy train ride from Shinjuku station, and there was a shuttle bus that took us directly to the museum's gates. We'd gotten our tickets from Jon when we first arrived, but tickets are for a specific date and time. Ours were 10am on 14/4/14, which was pretty cool. We first watched a short film of some kids pretending to build a ship, which led to them piloting a ship into the ocean to go whaling. After that, we went to explore the animation exhibit room, which had various types of stop-motion machines and looped reels of interesting animation. Across the building, there were multiple exhibits on lenses, which I found particularly interesting. Katie told me about pinhole cameras while we looked at one. On the second floor, there was a recreation of his work studios, which were chock full of drawings, models, and sketches from various movies. It was interesting to see the layering of scenes in that room as well. We spent some time in the gift shop on the third floor, and made various purchases, before heading upstairs to a rooftop garden and exploring the remainder of the grounds. The whole experience was wonderful, and I'm glad we got to go; I look forward to re-watching all of his movies.

After the museum, we dropped off our items at the hotel, then walked to Meiji shrine in Yoyogi park. The shrine was built in honor of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shokun, grandparents of the current Emperor. There were extremely large torii gates at all entrances to the shrine, and the shrine itself was rather large as well. We paid our respects, then left the park and walked to Harajuku, where we tried in vain to spot some Harajuku outfits. (We eventually saw a couple of Harajuku girls, but it was slim pickings.) We did see some interesting, if profane, t-shirts and sweatshirts while in Harajuku, but nothing really worth mentioning. Then we headed to Shibuya Crossing, the busiest crossing in the world. We watched a few crossings, which were mind-bogglingly busy, then crossed ourselves. (It is said that at the busiest times, 1000 people will be crossing the street during one walk sign.) We caught the train back to the hotel, and got ready for dinner.

Dinner last night at the New York Grill was spectacular. We arrived on the top floor to an amazing view of Tokyo, which extended around the entire rooftop through huge windows. We were shown to our seats, which were beneath a mural of baseball players meant to symbolize the Yankees. We looked over the wine menu, and were surprised to see Scribe Riesling on it! Being members of Scribe, we were excited that their wine is doing well enough to be found overseas. We ended up getting glasses of reds, and steaks for dinner. My steak was a delicious New York strip of Australian beef, cooked perfectly mid-rare. It was a fitting dinner for our last night in Tokyo.

We're nearly packed, so it's time to sign off. Looking forward to finishing our Tokyo time in style!

-B