Shower Fiasco and the Electric City

Now this is the morning after the night before! The group got in fairly late last night and in my ultimate wisdom I decided to have a shower before bed, so I could sleep in a little later and avoid the rush in the morning. However, in that ultimate wisdom I locked myself out my room without a towel. After pacing back and forth for quite a while, wet in my boxers, debating with myself whether I should wake people up, I finally got cold enough to knock on my room door at about 5am. Amanda, thankfully, is a good roommate and let me in. Although she does make me knock twice, letting me suffer a little longer then necessary. So unsurprisingly, I am in no rush this morning and wait until as late as possible to wake up for the day and, surprisingly, I feel fine. I am definitely still a little drunk. The activity this morning is a Sushi making class, the favourite of non-fish eaters all around the world. I joke, but it was actually a really great experience. I even try and share my thoughts on the flavour of umami to everyone, by describing it as earthy about 20 times which quickly becomes a running joke. I was sat with Ashley, Katie and Stephen. I was actually riding really high until about five minutes before the end, and then my hangover kicked in. After spending quite a while doing everything I could to make my sushi look as good as possible, I could not bring myself to eat it. However, Rachel picked me for third place for best looking. Although this was clearly out of pity, I will take it. Ashley won and to be honest I have to agree, hers did look impeccable. So it turns out fish and I don’t mix well, especially when I am hungover, who knew?

Me, I knew, I definitely knew that but, hey, we had fun!

It is a truly interesting experience; we are walked to the entrance of this café and greeted by waitresses dressed as ninjas and shown to a free table. The point of these cafés, from what I understand, is that the staff are very cutesy and manga like, not necessarily sexual in nature. Although when our group, a decent mix of both men and women, get there we find only single men there. Nonetheless we decide to commit and get the mixture of the different welcome packages. Along with all you can drink for 40 mins we also get packages for two singalongs, two light shows and what would of been board breaking, but they where out of boards, so instead we where allowed some photos, which you would normally have to pay for. It is a fun experience, we don’t really understand anything that is going on, as the staff only spoke Japanese, but we enjoyed the shows nonetheless and got a good amount of drinks in, so would highly recommend it – a throughly entertaining experience!

After the lesson I just about make it back to the hostel. Jasmine kindly walks with me to a 7/11 where we both get some cash and I get a meal to eat at the hostel, having not had my sushi I am rather hungry. It is a surprisingly nice meal for a microwave one, I get rice with a scrambled egg and breaded chicken cutlet. I wolf it down as soon as I am back at the hostel, watching the final episode of the latest season of F1: Drive to Survive; I am so ready to see a live one in Australia if I get the chance! Now full and feeling a little better, I head for a nap as the group have some free time before our next outing. So I set my alarm for half an hour, then an hour, then two hours which finally turns into three hours. I am not really sure at what point a nap becomes a sleep, but I have to admit I feel like I am pushing it when I get to the three hour mark. Finally I drag myself out of bed and into the shower and get ready for our next outing. We are heading for the electric city, Akihabara, famous for its electronics and anime/manga related stores. Amanda has mentioned wanting to go to a maid café and I want to as well. Tom, from China, mentioned them and said although they can be an awfully awkward experience, they are one you have to do.

When we arrive on the metro, Rachel takes us to what will be our meet up point and fills us in on a little of the history of the area. Now a famous shrine to all things nerdy and electronic, it all started with a student who liked to play around with electronics years ago. He discovered he had a talent for making handheld radios and started selling them on a market stall in the area. This stall started to gain a bit of a reputation and others decided to join him and soon there was a whole market for all your electronic needs. Eventually, big business and investors cottoned onto the hype, and invested in creating the magnificent monolithic buildings that this area is now famous for. With multi-story buildings dedicated to Manga, Old school video games, Arcade games and so much more. Anyway, we were here for the more Otaku culture, which is the cutesy side of all the manga geeky stuff. So having asked Rachel for a little advice we head out in search of the costumed girls that stand advertising their maid cafés. We quickly find a street full of them and the group settles on Sinobazu Ninja Maid café.

Cooking with a hangover

Game Panic, Akihabara

Once we had finished our 40 minutes we headed back towards the meet up point and went into one of the monolith buildings, this one dedicated to arcade games. It was amazing, there was every game you could think of from Dance Dance Revolution to Competitive PacMan, to my personal favourite growing up, Time Crisis Two. Luke and I, now adults, have enough coins to smash into the machine for extra lives and actually complete the game, something which I have never done before. Later as the group starts to all come together again, we join in some games we have seen a lot of locals play, involving almost playing a piano like board to the direction on the board. Ashley, once again steps up and shows us all up! She asks me to film her and am I glad I did. She picks expert difficulty and still manages to get 99% accuracy. Me and the others on the other hand, pick beginner and struggle to get passed 80%. I make myself feel better by winning a couple of rounds of competitive PacMan, during which I discovered, Lucinda, another new friend on the group, may just be as competitive as me when it comes to games! After we are all gamed out we head back to the hostel for a relatively early night and some much needed sleep!

Pac-Man Battle Royale

Ashley the Expert
(click on the top right hand icon)

Coy about my cooking award

A Ninja Maid leads the team