Ghibli Museum and Aladdin

So this past week has been rather busy for me.

First my class performed a skit of "Aladdin" for the Meikai School Festival yesterday. So this whole week was devoted to rehearsing, which I didn't complain about because the teachers gave us little homework all week.

On Thursday, I finally fulfilled my otaku dream of going to the Studio Ghibli museum in Mitaka.  I went with my friend Thuong, and it was AMAZING!

The museum itself is not very big, just 4 floors, but each floor is packed with stuff to look at and narrow hallways and doors of all different shapes and sizes, which makes navigating an interesting task.

The stain glass windows everywhere were beautiful, each depicting a different Ghibli movie, I was able to take a few pictures of them, but photography was not allowed inside the museum.

Basically the 1st floor of the museum covers the history of animation and a timeline of the Ghibli movies produced.  The 2nd floor had a replica of a Studio Ghibli animation room, where frames are drawn and how they are colored.  It was nifty to see the process.  Of course all the explanations were in Japanese, so I couldn't read much as I know only a few kanji characters.

The 3rd and 4th floors kind of mix together, I cant really remember what was on each, but I know that there was a giant cat bus for children to play on (I wanted to play in it soooo badly).  And of course there was a gift shop on the 4th floor, which was PACKED! even more crowded than the galleries! XP

I bought more things than I should have, of course. But I regret nothing.  My favorite item I purchased was a Howl's Moving Castle calender.  It is a statue of Howl's castle, where dice with the date, month, and day of the week are displayed on various parts of the castle. It's really cool and can be used indefinably.

In the museum's garden there is a cafe, the Straw Hat Cafe, that has all organic foods. The food there was DELICIOUS! and not terribly expensive.  My friend and I shared a chocolate parfait, which was like a foot tall with layers of fruits, cake, and ice cream. It was sooo good.

Then we both had "here come the sun" cream soda.  It starts out as purple on the bottom and yellow on the top, with blood orange ice cream on top.  But once you mix the colors, they turn pink! and it was really sweet and wonderful.

Then on Saturday was the Aladdin skit, which went pretty well I thought.  The crowd was small, but I didn't mind a small crowd (I'm sure we made tons of mistakes in our Japanese XP)  I was villain #2, not really Iago, not Jafar, just some evil guy in a witch's hat and sparkling red cape.

If there's one thing I learned, I learned that  Japanese people love taking pictures. After the play, I swear we had like a 30 minute photo session where people just crowded around and took our picture.  I mean our costumes were nothing spectacular, just a random hodgepodge of various items that one can find at home relatively easy.  But still they wanted our pictures anyway, with little girls crowding around Jasmine and Aladdin.  It was really cute.

Tomorrow I'll be going to Tokyo Disneyland with two friends of mine. I'm really looking forward to it!

I guess I better squeeze in some school into my busy schedule.....lol XD