Day 10 (Aug 8) - The Day Before the Climb

The train ride, including layovers, from Takayama to Shin-Okubo (the location of our hotel in Tokyo) takes approximately five and a half hours. With that said, we left early once again. The first train took us to Nagoya while the second one took us to Shinagawa. Our final train was the Yamanote Line, which took us to Shin-Okubo -- like a Korean town within Tokyo. 

After dropping off our luggage at our hotel, we traveled to a nearby ramen restaurant for lunch. 

With lunch out of the way, we made the 30 minute journey to Mitaka to visit a place that has always been on my list, but never had the opportunity to visit: Ghibli Museum. Back in the day, you had to go to a Lawson's convenience store to book tickets (like how we did with Fujiko-F-Fujio Museum), but we could now book tickets online.

We opted to walk towards the museum instead of taking the bus. It was certainly peaceful walking down the neighborhood without the massive crowds.

We were about 30 minutes earlier than our appointed time, so we waited outside the museum. In all honesty, I was filled with excitement. As we entered the museum, I had to say that I was sorely disappointed. The museum was all in Japanese, and the artwork or art boards (I think that's what they're called) did not strike out to me. We finished going through the entire museum in about 20 minutes, and waited about 15 minutes to see a short animation: Boro the Caterpillar. Apparently this short was put out as a potential movie, but they decided to go with Princess Mononoke instead. Thank goodness that Mononoke made the cut instead of Boro. Boro was... weird.

I apologize for being so negative about the museum, but out of all the activities/events/things I've done in Japan, this was my most disappointed event. If you have a decent grasp of Japanese and really enjoy Studio Ghibli films, you'll probably enjoy going here.

After the museum, we went back to our hotel to check in. Luckily for us, they brought our luggage upstairs for us. I felt somewhat bad since this hotel didn't have an elevator and my luggage must have weighed about 45 lbs.

We ventured to Odaiba at around 7 PM, later than what we would usually travel at in Japan. The reason why we were out so late was us trying to stay up late for tomorrow. With Odaiba, we got to see the 1:1 Unicorn Gundam up close. They took down RX-78 a couple years ago to replace it with the Unicorn. I was quite pleased with the change since Unicorn is one of my all time favorite mobile suits. They had a short 10 minute film where you get to see Unicorn transform (as it is synced with the film). 

Once that was over, I went over to the Gundam Cafe nearby and purchased my first and only for the trip, bubble tea. The cafe had a promotion in which if you purchase a bubble tea, you get to keep a reusable plastic bottle. 

We went inside Diver City (a large mall where Unicorn stands in front of) to stop by the food court for dinner. I opted for my first and only for the trip, omurice. (A lot of first and onlys...). Seeing that it was nearly 10, it was time to head back to the hotel. At the hotel, I managed to stay up for a couple more hours before finally heading to sleep at around midnight.

As for the reason why we stayed up so late... find out in my next blog post!