Posts Tagged ‘maid cafe’

Although I still haven’t written about the first day in Tokyo, I’ll skip ahead a bit to our Ghibli Museum and Akihabara visit. The Ghibli museum was a must when we first began planning this trip and required us to purchase our tickets ahead of time as they cannot be purchased at the museum. The entire complex is located within a park, only a small sign indicates where the entrance is. We handed our voucher to the attendant standing outside the entrance, who then greeted us, talked into a two-way radio to let the front desk know we had arrived, and escorted us the the entrance. The entire process was very personalized and seemed rather odd. The complex itself is odd as well, some doors are extremely short, and generally everything is designed with children in mind. To get a better idea, I would suggest watching this video tour since we were not permitted to take pictures inside. I especially enjoyed the areas which re-created the working environments of an animation studio, which also included many original drawings and cels. In my opinion the Ghibli museum far surpassed anything Disney has in the states, everything is authentic yet directly oriented towards children.

Next on our list was Union Commerce, located in a kitchen wares district of Tokyo. I wanted to either purchase a Chef’s knife or a special type of coffee maker After struggling to find the store front, Matt was able to somehow direct us to the right location despite not having an accurate location. Although the knives at Union Commerce did look fantastic, I just could not justify the $300 for a Chef’s knife especially since I’m on a rather tight budget. The adjacent store however did have the siphon coffee maker I was looking for, which I purchased. As far as I can tell, these are only readily available in Japan and the one I purchased seemed to be a great deal. The shop attendant was very helpful despite the language barrier, and offered us both complementary espresso.

Lastly on our list was Akihabara, the electronics/anime central of Tokyo.

Some of our purchases from Akihabara.

Although we did visit Akihabara the day before, we were only able to scratch the surface of what was actually there. Both Matt and I had specific purchases in mind, so we set off looking through DVD stores. It should be noted this is a rather dangerous undertaking considering neither of us can read Kanji well, many of the stores are ero (porn) oriented. Subsequently some of the stores we left immediately, this proved to be very frustrating as we had no idea which store to visit and which to avoid. In any case I was able to find a box set and the second DVD of Bamboo Blade for an amazing price, and Matt was ale to find a few sound tracks. In keeping with the theme of Akihabara, we decided to visit a Maid Cafe after our search was over.

An advertisement for a Maid Cafe. If your walking in Akihabara, girls dressed as Maids will hand these out to promote their various cafes.

Although both of us were somewhat adverse to visiting one of these establishments, we decided we should give it a go since we were in Akihabara and it would be a good cultural experience. For those of you who don’t know what a Maid Cafe is, basically its a cafe run by waitresses dressed in French Maid costume (or cosplay), who will serve you and generally keep lonely Japanese guys company. There was a Maid Cafe somewhere that had a special To Aru Majutsu No Index/Toradora cosplay this weekend, although sadly we were unable to locate it. We did however visit another cafe, and although the experience was rather strange and uncomfortable at times (our maid did not speak any English) it was entertaining and quiet an experience. I’m not sure if would do it again, perhaps at another cafe in Tokyo, however if such a place existed at home it would not be a repeated visit. The picture is one of many adds being handed out by maids in Akihabara, although some seemed rather dubious (and expensive), as the one pictured is advertised as a “relaxation salon”. It far to late to write further, especially since tomorrow we leave for Fuji!