Part One: Tumbling Around In Tokyo

We rented an Air BnB for our week in Tokyo. We were supposed to meet the lady renting us the room at 5pm, but we didn't reach our final train stop til 5.20 pm. Carolanne and I were completely lost and wandered around for a while before asking for help from some kind older lady. The host's directions were just too poorly written. The lady was really nice and guided us all the way to our host meet-up spot. At one point, we were all lost, but the woman didn't give up on us and asked a few shop keepers for directions. We found out through broken English that her daughter lived in San Francisco!

Once we got to our host, we thanked the woman profusely and were on our way to a small apartment building around the block. It was a one bedroom with a tiny kitchenette and the smallest bathroom I've ever been in. Your knees hit the door when you were on the toilet, the tub barely fit our ass, and the sink was on top of the tub. Nevertheless, the apartment was cute, cheap, and close to Hatagaya station.

Pics of our cozy apartment! Except another twin bed was crammed into the tiny main room.

We decided to have a low-key night and get drinks/do karaoke. Both of us were tired and bitchy because we had been getting lost /lugging our shit around all day, but we decided to go to downtown Shibuya and look for a nice sit-down bar. We stopped by the 7/11 beforehand to buy our tickets for the Ghibli museum only to find out it had been sold out for MONTHS. Carolanne was absolutely heartbroken, so we Googled our options and luckily found what was probably a scalper. It was kind of a rip off, but still worth it, so we made plans to pick up the tickets the next day.

On our way to Shibuya, there was another foreign traveler who was bent over a trashcan on the side of the street. It seemed like he was talking to it, but what he was saying? we don't know. Right after we walked by, he spun around to shout after us, "Hey big booty girl! You stay thick, don't go small!" Normally when I get catcalled, I am offended and upset. However, this time I couldn't stop myself from quietly agreeing. We immediately devolved into fits of masked laughter, and Carolanne turned to me and said, "He stopped talking to his trashcan girlfriend when he saw an even bigger trashcan walking by."

When we got to Shibuya, some Senegalese guy started talking to us and hitting on me (and I got to practice my French again!). We told him we were looking for a bar instead of a club, so he took us to some place called "Gas Panic" (though we read the sign as Gas Picnic as first). It was a smokey dive bar that looked sketch as hell -but was on the main street! Carolanne and I decided to use the word "shartroom" (because we're gross and immature and bathroom humor is funny to us) in case one of us needed to bail. We bought some drinks at Gas Panic and decided to give the place a chance. However, at some point the dude touched my butt, so I turned to Carolanne and furiously started whispering "shartroom!!" in Carolanne's ear. Unfortunately, Carolanne didn't understand what I had said and ended up going off to the bar to get us more drinks. I met her at the bar and told her we needed to bail, so she handed off the drinks to some random cool women and booked it out of there.

Our next bet was to try a karaoke room to avoid the creepy dudes; however, karaoke and fun just didn't seem to be in our cards as we would have a 30 minute wait. Both of us were disappointed from our night and moody and we ended up getting into our only fight of the trip. It was dumb, didn't last long, and we ended up working it out on our cab ride home.

On our night walk back to the apartment -the streets are so clean!

Determined tomorrow would be a better day, we got up, got dressed, and took one of the worst showers of our lives in the smallest bathroom ever. You couldn't stand up, so you just had to sit in the fetal position and spray water over yourself.

Doesn't get cozier than this.

We decided to spend our first full day of Tokyo shopping in Harajuku. It was a Saturday, so the shops were super crowded. Still, everything was as cute as I remembered it to be. Unfortunately, most of the clothes were "one size fits all" which really means "one size fits most except you fat lazy Americans", but we still managed to find some cute things. Our pick of the day was definitely our wide brimmed fashionista hats! After we finished shopping, we trekked to the Aoyama Flower Market. Along the way we saw a bunch of really cute black lab service dogs! The Aoyama Flower Market was one of the most beautiful shops we visited in Tokyo. We took an outrageous amount of selfies while we waited in the 45 minute line (worth it).

After flower fun and picking up our Ghibli tickets, we set off for an expensive nice sushi place. It had 5 or 6 courses and unlimited beer and was so delicious! Thanks mom and dad! We ate to our hearts' content and head back to the room to get ready for clubbing in Shibuya.

It was so deluxe and so good!

We arrived in Shibuya and were immediately stopped by some drunk Japanese guy who hit on us while his friend stood there looking a little embarrassed but mostly done with his friend's bullshit. They led us to a club called T2 and we decided to go in. The cover charge was ¥2500 (about $25), the music was just okay and the drinks were dismal, but we made the best of it. We ended up dancing until 2am and ended our night at a nearby noodle house on the way to the apartment.

Suddenly it was late next morning and we were worse for the wear. Our Ghibli tickets were for the afternoon, so we got ready and ventured over there. On our way to the subway, we found a Chinese noodle shop that looked divine and immediately beelined over. It was hands down the best noodles and Shanghai dumplings of my life (and our favorite meal in Japan). Think handmade noodles in the best hot and sour soup you've ever had (there were other flavors too). We left considering our lives changed for good and made our way to the Ghibli museum an hour early. Since we were so early, we stopped by a little cake café across the street and ate some crème brûlée with warm milk and tea.

It was finally time for us to enter the museum and we were ecstatic!

This nearby cafe was perfect for our wait!

We started our visit with seeing a cute short film about a preschool's class slowly transforming into a boat out at see. The boys were trying to catch a whale! You didn't have to like animé to appreciate how well they capture the perfect essence of a kid's mind. Throughout the museum, there were concept art and sculptures demonstrating stop motion. At the end, we went to the beautiful gardens at the top of the roof and took a picture with the robot from The Castle in the Sky. Finally it was time for us to go, so I went home for nap time, and Carolanne went off to visit the Calico Cat Café.

And now for some bonus pics! My prime cosplay snaps of the day (as seen in Howl's Moving Castle):