Hello hello! Well to start off with I should probably share that I'm currently slightly buzzed off a bottle of sake that a random couple bought for me at my sushi restaurant. It is crazy how strong that stuff is, the bottle is smaller than a can of beer yet I am feeling loopy! I stole the bottle because I think it's pretty and would make a nice vase. Anyway, I have been meaning to post in my blog for the last few days because I visited a couple of cool places this past week.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I had this past Thursday off because the Vernal Equinox (first day of spring) is celebrated as a national holiday in Japan... a holiday which the Japanese celebrate by going to parks and getting drunk. Unfortunately for them, it was sort of a crappy day, definitely not a good drunken park day. Jenn, her friend who was visiting, and I still decided to take advantage of our time off by going to the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku. To be honest I'm not really a big museum person, but this one was pretty cool, they had full size models of houses from the Edo period and some cool life size dioramas. After we finished at the museum we decided to go to Akihabara a.k.a Akiba a.k.a Electric Town. The Japanese kids usually call it Akiba, so I'll stick with that. Akiba is basically the video game/manga/anime Mecca for all the weird Japanese guys who are completely obsessed with that stuff (they are known as Otaku). Upon entering Akiba we set out to find three things: 1) A maid cafe 2) Creepy vending machines that sold stuff like used underwear 3) Crepes. The first two were specifically related to Akiba, as Metropolis magazine explains "Tokyo's Electric Town is a place where dreams and fantasy become reality," now I'm not exactly sure if I would consider skanky maids and used underwear my "fantasy" but they did seem awfully amusing! For those of you who are wondering what a maid cafe is, well, it's pretty much what it sounds like. You go to a cafe and the waitresses are dressed in slutty pastel colored maid costumes. The maids are extremely accommodating, and will sometimes go as far as to mix people's drinks for them at the table and even spoon feed customers if asked! After a little bit of a search we arrived at a shop that was chock full of toy dispensers, the kind you would see in front of a grocery store selling balls and stickers for kids. These machines, however, were not selling stickers, instead they were filled with plastic figurines of female manga and anime characters. The store looked sketchy enough that we thought there was a possibility that they might sell used underwear in the back. We headed toward the rear of the store and the farther we went, the more risqué the figurines became. We did not find any underwear but we did find big chested naked figurines and weird model butts that were just 2 inch segments of the human body (from the waist to mid thigh) that displayed various types of sexy plastic lingerie. In addition to the crazy pornographic toys in the back we also discovered an elevator. We looked at the floor listings and discovered that there was a maid cafe on the top floor. We decided to check it out, but when we got up we were disappointed to find maids dressed in floor length black dresses in what appeared to be a very dainty and proper little cafe. That was far too normal and unexciting for us, so we left and decided to look for a more interesting maid cafe. After a short search we found what we were looking for, an entire building devoted to maid cafes! There was a different cafe on each floor, so of course we had to check all of them. The first one looked a little boring, so we headed up, when we reached the top we found the quintessential maid cafe but it was just too weird! It looked like a lounge with modern white leather furniture, it was very brightly lit, and besides the maids it was all young guys. Jenn and I felt like that was a little TOO sketchy, so we tried one that was sort of in between, but they wouldn't let us in. We settled on Royal Milk, the first one that we originally thought looked boring, upon a second look we saw a sluttier looking maid so we were satisfied. It was fun and our maid seemed excited to have Americans at her table. At one point she randomly drew a picture of a popular Japanese cartoon character for us on the back of a napkin and explained that his name was Doseisan (Mr. Dosei) and that he lived on Saturn. I kept the napkin as a souvenir. As we headed back to the station we were content to have found 1.5 of the things we were looking for (we figured plastic butts came close to used underwear) and as we talked we came upon a crepe cart! Crepes are quite popular in Japan and you can get them stuffed with basically anything, I like chocolate and whipped cream personally, but at some places you can even got lox and cream cheese crepes! They don't call it lox though... Anyway, it was truly a perfect end to the day.
A few days later after my play rehearsal I met up with Jenn and our friend Ivan for a picnic at Yoyogi Park in Harajuku. It was so cool because on Sundays there are all sorts of performers and people dressed in crazy costumes. My favorite is the Tokyo Rockabilly Club that congregates in the front of the park and dances to music from the fifties. All the guys wear black leather jackets and black leather pants or tight jeans, they have huge CRAZY hairdo's, and tons of tattoos. The women wear poodle skirts or fifties style dresses and cute little cardigans. There was also a group of people holding signs that said "free hugs" so I went and got a free hug, actually, I got two. Jenn took pictures, so I'll post them on my webshots once I get them from her. This was Ivan's first time in Harajuku so we took him down the main, trendy street, Takeshita Dori, that's very popular with the Japanese youth. I have never in my life been on a more crowded street. Getting down the street was okay, but coming back up to get to the train station was insane. We got to a point where we literally couldn't move... at all. We were just stuck in the middle of a sea of thousands of people who seemed to not know how to move and that cliché "I felt like I was in a can of sardines" never seemed more true. Sometimes people would try to push through and then you would hear screams and everyone would just go toppling into each other, I was literally holding up the girl in front of me. She was so short I was afraid she might fall down and get crushed by a stampede of people if we actually started moving. We managed to escape into a weird photo booth shop and when we emerged a few minutes later the crowd had thinned out a tiny bit and we managed to squeeze our way through to the station. Needless to say, I will not be going back to Takeshita Dori on a Sunday any time soon, being trapped in the crowd was fairly unpleasant.
One more thing before I go, the CHERRY BLOSSOMS ARE OUT!!!!!!!! I saw the first blossoms today and I got so excited! I'm planning a cherry blossom viewing party for my school, but unfortunately the only available date that we can do it is after they bloom, so I'm hoping they won't all be gone by the time we have the party. They are only in bloom for about 10 days, so I'm going to try to visit as many parks and take as many pictures as I can during this time. They truly are so beautiful, if I had my own personal heaven it would be filled with streams and waterfalls and cherry blossoms that were always in bloom.
9 years ago
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