Japan, here I go~ Part 4

Day 4

It's a brand new day, brand new beginning. This day, we planned to go to Studio Ghibli and I've pre-booked the entrance ticket as they can be limited at times. I booked 8 tickets, 4 for Studio Ghibli and 4 for Fujiko museum for all of us through a site, Bridge.jpn. The people there is so nice and so responsive! I remember placing the order in the late afternoon and within 20 minutes, they replied me asking whether I can make the payment within 2 hours so that they can rush to buy my tickets for me. And surely afterwards, they replied me again saying that they already have my tickets and ready for posting. That smells like dedication to me! Impression for Japanese people, checked..

The tickets came in such packaging. Inside contains 2 folders separating Ghibli's tickets from Fujiko's.

Anyway, on our forth day, before we went to Studio Ghibli at Mitaka, we decided to walk around our Ryokan, which is located at Asakusa. It was raining on that day, but despite that, there were a lot of people at the shrine that we visited. Walking to Senso-Ji is only around 5 to 10 minutes from where we stayed, along the way there are people selling foods and souvenirs, so we went ahead and bought something for ourselves. 

It's basically red bean-ish sweet paste..

The famous lantern that every tourist will take photo of in Senso-Ji.

In Malaysia, we try to avoid the smoke.. But in Japan, they let the smoke on themselves. #culturaldifference

It was raining, but somehow it makes a pretty scenery to look at.

Saw this outside Senso-Ji Shrine, their vending machine provides free WiFi!

And then this, such a cute mini van and its eyes even blinked at us.

After that, off we go to the long awaited Ghibli Museum. To make things even better, Bridge.jpn emailed me on the previous day reminding me that my visit to the museum is today and that the weather is not too hot to do some sightseeing. Dedication at its best. There was no direct train access to the museum, so we had to take buses on top of subway to get there. We got lost a few times, even missed our stop near the museum. After asking a few traffic polices, running around in the rain, we finally reached its entrance.

The entrance itself impressed me so much, the receptionist is so friendly and gave us our tickets together with different languages of map. Every ticket is unique as it has 3 consecutive frames of a random anime from Studio Ghibli.

Portion of the map for Studio Ghibli.

The ticket for Studio Ghibli, it's like a film negative and everyone has different ones.

A giant stands alone in the rain, so was I.. The feels~

A secret path near the giant robot that not a lot of people know about.. Let's see where it leads to..

Fans of Castle in the sky, recall this? It's the core of Laputa!

We weren't allowed to take photo in the museum, so it's no surprise that I don't have a lot of pictures to upload here. But honestly, the museum itself did not disappoint. The museum is very well decorated with subtle callbacks to their famous art, and there's even a short tour showing the process of making an anime from scratch. Despite it being called a museum, it gives the vibe of a home, a home of the great artist known as Hayao Miyazaki, certainly a very heart warming feel.

We ended our visit to Studio Ghibli with a short film which every guest is entitled to watch once per visit. It was in Japanese so no one in the group can understand a thing except taking in the scenes and recall the techniques used in creating each frames.

Night view of the museum. I don't have a great camera back then, but you can see the giant at the rooftop. 

After we left Studio Ghibli, I wanted to visit Shibuya for its famous crossing. Once we reached Shibuya, we decided to have our dinner first. So we walked around and met 2 Chinese ladies in one of the pharmacies. they were so friendly and nice to give us a few ideas for dinner in Shibuya. The one that we went with, is takoyaki. We went to a random takoyaki restaurant as we were quite hungry at the time, luckily it turned out to be nice. 

Smokes, a lot of smokes.

After the dinner, we walked around and this time, to find a place to enjoy the crossing. Starbucks caught our eyes and it is at second floor, perfect! Also, we took some pictures with the Hachiko statue and it was hard moving around, let alone taking a decent group-fie with the statue.

Starbucks at Shibuya, overseeing the crossing.

The famous Hachiko statue in the middle of a large crowd.

Our visit to Shibuya is a short one, we didn't even get to shop much as the malls were closing and the crowd was dispersing. So we decided to call it a day and head back to our Ryokan.. Up next, Fujiko F. Fujio Museum, Tokyo tower, Harajuku and more..