December 9th

Today we wanted to go to the Manga museum and the Kaleidoscope museum. After a breakfast set at the anonymous restaurant we took the subway to Karasuma - Oite station which is just near the Manga museum. This museum is in a converted primary school and it was quite a lovely building to wander around. There were not too many guests and most of them had there heads buried in manga since the museums library is spread all throughout the halls and visitors are free to browse. There were only a few galleries but they were all very interesting and we were completely engrossed in examining each display. I particularly liked the gallery about french comics.

We had lunch at a cafe in the manga museum and after browsing the gift shop (we bought a dual language version of the first Doraemon book) we headed towards the Kaleidoscope museum. It had just started to rain but we had an umbrella. On the way, we noticed a strange doorway with shops inside. It turned out to be a nice mall with a Beams and a Village Vanguard bookshop. After shopping for a while we continued to walk and soon found the Kaleidoscope museum. The exhibition was great. There were a mix of simple kaleidoscopes to beautiful wooden ones to extremely elaborate kaleidoscopes. Chrissy liked a big tabletop kaleidoscope which was an amazing work of art in glass and clockwork. We examined each one carefully and were only slightly put off by a lady who kept helping us to use them.

After the museum, we walked back to the shopping arcade and found many more interesting shops. Chrissy found a vintage button shop but it was too intimidating to attempt to buy anything! I found Dad's bag shop and we finally found Chrissy's favourite gothic/lolita shop, Metamorphose, but it was closed on Tuesdays.

We took the subway back home and had dinner at unknown place. Maybe tomorrow we'll branch out our eating, but we're so tired by the time we get home that its hard to face finding different food.