treacle abroad

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Akihabara is known for its electronics. In fact, they have an area called 'Electronic Town' in which we spent 3 hours on 2 floors of a 7 floor electronics store. 1 floor is as big as a whole Harvey Norman back home. Not only do they seem to have anything that you could possibly be looking for, they have a squillion varieties and brands to choose from. My favourite find was a little label printer that was a miniature of the ZM400 (big industrial label printers that we use at the SAN in Sterile Processing and other depts) : )

The other thing we did at Akihabara was get our Master Licences at a Maid Cafe complete with commemorative photos.

Poses as per Maid's instruction - 'Love' and 'Cats'

A Maid Cafe is similar to a normal cafe except that you are served by super attentive maids wearing big fluffy french maid outfits. We are seated by our maid to a chorus of maids saying something to the effect of 'welcome lord and lady'.

A menu is dutifully presented to us by our maid and explained - however in Japanese. You can order the usual food and drink but also order photos with maids of your choice or even kids games to play with the maids.

Before eating and drinking our icecream and coffee, we had to put 'magic' into them using special words and hand movements as instructed by our maid.

We barely understood a whole word while we were there but they would insistently jibbered to us in their high pitched squeelish voices with their big doe eyes staring at us until we nodded our heads.

In short, a place we'd highly recommend to James or Keene.

You can check out their website here.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

We're going to Ebisu!

Actually, we went today. We heard that it was a place for the well to do but all we found at first was..

Cool stencils but we wanted more.. So we kept walking and found this..

An Italian cafe (Eataly). It seems lame to eat/drink there when on holiday in Japan but by day 5 of our trip I was severely craving some good cake. After rejuvenating here we continued on our merry way..

Every now and then between the modern (and often drab) looking apartments, we find an old Edo period house privately tucked away that has survived with perfectly manicured gardens.

Time for a quick location check..

And we're back on track!

Chateau Restaurant.

The Beer Museum - couldn't go inside as it had already closed when we arrived. We found that a bit strange as everything is usually open until 10pm in Tokyo.

The Sapporo building.

And that was Ebisu.

Entertainment at Yoyogi Park Festival

I really don't know what to say about the bands because they were all amazingly good.

This guy had some crazy dance moves.

These guys were my favourite.

These guys were Adam's favourite.

This Jazzy band was also amazing but I only caught the end. They sounded so much better in the flesh.

We don' like reggae.. oh no! WE LOVE IT!

Mad hair

Grease is the word..

And this is strip where it was all happening.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Coffee In A Can Part 2

Yo Yo Yoyogi Park!

Yesterday (Sunday) we set out looking for those Harajuku girls with wicked stylz as they are rumoured to be out in force on Sundays in Harajuku. What we found instead was Yoyogi park lined with live music, food stalls and other entertainment! Will post some video clips of the live entertainment another time but here are some pics of the food fair..