Saturday 25/4:
Ok, still working on catching up with my blog and jumping ahead to the next unique event of my life, going to a Maid Café for the first time and Ghibli Museum.
It was a gray and rainy Saturday, packed with Japan experiences all arranged by Yuka, my host family friend. She is really good at arranging things to do for her exchange student friends, and we were a whole bunch of YSEP’ers going that day. She also arranged a hanami lunch party that month to, but I will have to skip it along with, some Wander Vogel parties and a lab party (just mentioning them since this is sort of a diary for me, and it is practical for remembering things afterwards). Luckily all the events were indoor events, so we didn’t notice much to the rain.
First of was lunch at a maid café. And where do you go to find a maid café in Tokyo do you think, Akihabara of course. There was a line to get inn and everything, mostly because the place was tiny, but also because it was popular I would think.
A maid café is by the way a café serviced by girls dressed in cute maid outfits. Very popular among otakus (Japanese for geeks), but I was surprised about how many “normal looking” people that ate there. There were no pictures allowed, except the food (since you had to pay to get your picture taken with one of the maids). The food was cute enough for picture taking. Here is a dessert I shared with Yuka, and an omelet that one of the maids drew one with ketchup. Kari to (and) Yuka it said :P
Koorazy
After the maid café experience we headed of to Ghibli museum. Being a Ghibli fan, I had been looking forward to this part of the day.
Ghibli is a huge animations company over here, making great children’s movies, sort of like Japans Disney. Just like the Maid café there was no pictures allowed, so you will have to do with this one picture, taken from the outside from underneath the umbrella.
From the little you can see it was quite an interesting building. Tiny but with lots of small details, stairways, glass paintings, alcoves, bridges, exhibitions and possible the prettiest toilets in all of Tokyo. The point was that there was no sett order of which to explore the museum, you just ran around all the hidden pathways and saw what you found around the next corner. It was a lot of fun.
Other things to mention about Ghibli museum is that the tickets are not too expensive, but they are hard to get a hold of so you have to order some time in advance. You get to see a short movie to, which varies from day to day. We saw one of the “nekobus” or the “cat bus” from “Tonari no Totoro”, it was super cute and with lots of new versions of the nekobus, I won’t say more than that.
Also on the tickets you got a small random clip from one of the Ghibli movies that you could se if you held the ticket up to the light. I was the only one that could identify all the different clips everyone had gotten, so I guess I am a bigger Ghibli fan than I thought.
After Ghibli museum there was one more post for the day, a Japanese music performance. It is kind of hard to explain, but it was band music basically, just with lots of dancing and jumping around and colorful outfits and banners and swordplay and all kinds of different stage effects you can think of. Everyone was very energetic and it was a cool experience.
They played the soran dance of course, which I have already mentioned in my post from a class visit that you can find here. Everyone had to sing to the soran dance. Then there was janken-poi, or stone, scissors, paper (which is immensely popular over here) with the whole audience in the break. Another special Japanese twist was some kind of rattle thing we were handed to clap with or make rhythms with along to the songs. It was a lot easier than clapping all the time, since you only had to move your wrist a little, and people still clapped if they were very impressed with something in the performance.
So that was the ending of my long Japanese experiences day. Next up is also a Yuka event the following weekend, so look by my blog (I am getting a lot better at writing often again now I hope).
