Studio Ghibli, Shinjuku, and Akihabara

This morning we went to the Studio Ghibli Museum. Moccle had worked out all the trains we needed to get, but it's still a bit confusing changing trains and making sure you get a train that is going in the right direction and stops at the station you need. You also can't buy tickets direct to the station you want to go to if it means changing lines. We had to change from the Toei subway to JR, so we had to buy a ticket from the subway to the JR Station, then a ticket from there to the station we wanted to go to (actually we ended up buying 3 tickets each way as we couldn't see the price at the first JR station to get to the end JR station where we wanted to be, just the price to the JR station where we needed to change.

There is a Tokyo Free Ticket that was 1520 yen, which lets you use any Metro, Toei subway and JR East Tokyo train in one day, however since the station nearest the Studio Ghibli museum is outside the JR Tokyo East area, we would still have had to buy tickets there and back from the nearest JR Tokyo East station.

On the way to the museum, we had to change at Shinjuku, but it was quite confusing as there were 6 platforms all called JR Chuo line, which was the line we wanted. 4 of them said they were limited express, and two said they were rapid express. None of them said they were local.

The rapid express platforms seemed to be going in the correct direction (according to the stations they visited), however on the ticket machines, you could get a ticket to the station we wanted, but only via the limited express (and the tickets were quite expensive - 500 yen each).

We walked around a bit and went to a lower floor where there was a JR ticket office. So Moccle spoke to the lady there, and we got tickets on the rapid train to the station we needed. The lady took our tickets from us (the ticket machine at Shinjuku hadn't eaten them, unlike the ticket machines at most stations), and then it was something like 190 yen each for our tickets to the station we needed.

Although we had set out at about 9.15am, by the time we reached the Studio Ghibli museum it was around 11am. You weren't allowed to take photos in the museum, so it seemed I had wasted bringing my camera lenses, and tripod, but luckily they took the tripod off me and gave me a ticket thing to get it back when we were finished.

There wasn't really much to the Ghibli Museum, but it does show all the work that they put into their films, with lots of research, multiple layers of drawing/animation, and loads of drawings (there was a bit with a great pile of folders showing all the drawings they did for Ponyo, something like 170,000).

Including watching a 15 minute film and also a shorter animation, it only took us about an hour to look round everything there. After that we went back towards the station so we could get some lunch, as I thought I had seen quite a few convenience stores along there on the way to the museum. However, by the time we actually came across the first convenience store, we just about right next to the station (and so quite a bit away from the park where the Ghibli museum was, and where we wanted to eat lunch.

So we went in a convenience store and bought some food, then went to look for somewhere to sit and eat it. However, we came across the same brand of restaurant that we had eaten at a couple of times in Kyoto, so we went in there and bought our lunch from there, saving the convenience store food for tea.

We walked around Mitaka a bit, but didn't really see anything interesting, so we went back to the station and went to Shinjuku. We walked round Shinjuku a bit, which was mainly just shops, then went back to the hotel.

We had a rest at the hotel for about an hour, then went out to go to Akihabara, however after walking a bit I decided that it was raining too much, so we went back to the hotel. We waited for about half an hour, then went out again, and it had stopped raining.

To get to Akihabara, we had to change at Hibiya station to Yurakucho station (the two stations are connected according to our train map, but in actuality you had to leave Hibiya station and walk a short distance to Yurakucho station, though luckily there were blokes holding signs saying 'JR' with an arrow on them pointing the directions from Hibiya station to Yurakucho station.

We bought a ticket to Akihabara station from Hibiya station (you couldn't buy the ticket from our local station Onarimon as that is a Toei tube station, and we needed to get a JR line to Akihabara). But then when we got to Yurakucho station, we found that actually the tickets were no good. It seemed they were Metro tickets rather than JR, so we had to buy new tickets to get from Yurakucho to Akihabara. So the lesson is to only buy tickets when you get to the actual gate you need a ticket to go through.

When we got to Akihabara, we walked around a bit and I took a few panos. We also went in a few shops to see if I could get a replacement power supply for the external hard drive adapter so I wouldn't have to keep having to hold it in annoying positions while copying files to the hard drives (which often takes quite a while). Unfortunately none of the shops we tried did that sort of thing. One of them did sell USB hard drive adapters (so I could buy a complete replacement unit rather than just a replacement power adaptor), but the cheapest was something like 35,000 yen. Since I only need the adaptor for the rest of this holiday, I thought that was too much.

We also went in a couple of computer games shops, one had about 20 copies of Pokemon Stadium for the N64 for 10 yen each. Most of the games didn't seem that cheap though. Another shop had unboxed SNES's for about 30,000 each, and had one on that someone was playing on. There were also quite a few shops full of Anime/manga related stuff. One shop had a cardboard box outside it that had a photo of rude dude on it!! There were also some women dressed up in maids costumes or something weird and handing out leaflets throughout the area where we walked.

We got back to the hotel about 9pm, unfortunately we weren't able to use the Metro tickets we'd bought at any point in the journey, and when we put one in a fare adjustment machine, all it would let you do was to add 100 yen on to the price of the ticket.

When we got back to the hotel I took some more photos of the Tokyo Tower from our hotel, as it had its 'crystal' lights on, instead of the normal lights. When we had left the hotel earlier, it had just been using its normal lights. I wrote some more of this blog post while copying pictures across, and then sorted the photos.

Food
Breakfast: ½ White Choco Pain; ½ Long sweet bread thing with icing; Latte coffee.
Lunch: Beef; ground yam; onion; rice; wasabi; Miso soup (didn't like it - tasted fishy); Tofu (didn't like it - tasted like the milk stuff they make cheese out of before maturing it into cheese); water.
Tea: Caramel Baum; Latte Coffee.
Supper: ½ bag of some sort of cheese flavour Doritos; Bread thing with curry inside it; green tea.