Christmas Time in the City

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For the Christmas holidays Simon and I decided to temporarily abandon the countryside for the hustle and bustle of city life. Tokyo, an impressive mass of concrete containing of over 8 million people, was our destination of choice. This busy bee hive has plenty of entertainment and anything you could want to buy or eat. We arrived in Tokyo around 7:30 in the morning via the night bus. When we arrived it was too early for anything to be open so we window shopped around Ginza until the kabuki-za opened and we could get tickets for the first show of the day. Kabuki is a colorful drama-dance. It is the most popular and best known of the classical Japanese performing arts. The show we watch was called Takatoki It was a comedy about an arrogant lord ends up being tricked and mocked by a team of tengu goblins.
After the kabuki show we went to Ueno Park to see the largest as well as the oldest museum in Japan, the Tokyo National Museum. The museum is split into several buildings and a full day would be needed to see the entire complex. We only explored the main gallery, Hokan, which displays an amazing collection of Japanese art and artifacts. After the museum closed we checked into our hotel and headed out to dinner. I hadn’t eaten Mexican food since I was in Texas and I had been craving enchiladas and margaritas for months. Thanks to the internet we found a restaurant that had real bowl margaritas and scrumptious authentic food. I was so happy!
The next day was Christmas Eve and we met up with my friend Katie for a fun filled day at Tokyo Disneyland. Tokyo’s Disney Resort is almost exactly like the Disneyland in California, but all in Japanese which makes it quite an interesting experience. Ever heard a Mickey Mouse cartoon in Japanese? It’s pretty funny to hear classic character like Goofy, Mickey and Donald in a foreign language. The entire park was decorated for both its 25th anniversary and the Christmas season. The first order of business was to ride the tea cups, and then we bought silly hats to wear all day. I picked a Cheshire Cat hat which still makes me grin like one. We rode so many rides: Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain (Why do all the best rides have “mountain” in the name?), Star Tours, “It’s a Small World”, a carousel, The Haunter Mansion, etc, etc. We also watched three parades, met Mickey, went shopping, ate lunch at the Wonderland Café, met Alice and watched a fireworks show. (None of that was in order.^_^)Basically we had a busy day acting like the kids we still are.
For breakfast on Christmas morning we had KFC and mimosas. (I’m not kidding). Then we took the train the Mitaka to visit the Ghibli Museum. The Ghibli museum features artwork and mementos from the Studio Ghibli anime movies. The museum is mazelike and has no set path to follow. You can wander the museum anyway you choose, it has many interesting galleries, a gift shop, a café and a movie theater that shows special Ghibli shorts made for the museum. We saw Mei and the Kittenbus, which is a sort of sequel to My Neighbor Totoro. Everywhere in the museum there is a stunning attention to detail, even the tickets you receive have film stills from the movies. Since it was Christmas they had a group of musicians perform Christmas carols with bells. This place was my favorite I’ve been to in Tokyo. It felt more like you were in someone’s home studio than a museum. That night we went to a British pub in Shinjuku for Christmas dinner so Simon could have authentic food from his home too. Contrary to popular belief British food can actually be quite yummy.
The last two half days we spent wandering around the city. Before we went to Nikko we hung around in Harajuku, a trendy shopping area famous for girls in cosplay, window shopping for half a day and when we returned from Nikko we browsed around Akiharbara, Tokyo’s electronic and anime shopping central, for half a day before jumping on the Shinkansen back to Shikoku.

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