Number one! Unbereable! Oh my gosh!
We watched Hot Rod and went to bed at about 0230, so got up kind of late, played a bunch of House Of The Dead: Overkill and left the house at at 1400-ish for Ikebukuro. For some reason I was feeling kind of bummed out on the train.
It was still crazily boiling. Out here, drinks with straws in have ‘lucky zones’ under the lids - you twist the lid around and when you put the straw through, you might puncture the lucky zone. When I took the lid off to check how I’d done, I spilt coffee all over my grease-flannel. I hadn’t got the lucky zone either.
It was quite awesome seeing japanese pigeons, which reminds me - we saw a Swallowtail butterfly the other day. It was like a small bird.
Here is a guy actually selling The Big Issue in Ikebukuro.
For lunch I got an ‘Excellent tempura set’ for about £6, it was seriously excellent.
I’d seen a documentary saying there was a place where you could pay to stroke dogs in Sunshine City. To be honest it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to come to Japan. There isn’t one, though. Instead we went to Namjatown, which promised ‘Adventure!’ ‘Comedy!’ ‘Romance!’ ‘Memory!’ ‘Thrills!’ and ‘Emotional!’
We knew nothing about it, except that you could buy any type of ice-cream there (Dan had heard about bacon and chicken flavours), and that it had a shitload of cat-related things outside. On the way in there were hundreds of polaroids of cats stuck to the wall.
The cashier told us it wouldn’t be much fun without knowing japanese, but to be fair I think it made it a bit better. A screen on the way in showed everyone in Namjatown being terrorised by ghosts and then being saved by people with ghost-detectors. The whole time we were there, groups of children were running around with the things. Also one older person who seemed to be ghost-hunting by herself.
Ice-Cream City was the best. I got ‘coffee and milk’ and Dan got caramel, but we did see wasabi and soybean flavour. If we’d found bacon I like to think I would have got it, though. I liked the ‘Nazi-eagle’ theme at the entrance.
We walked around the rest of Namjatown a bit confused, paid 100 yen to get a weird eagle orchestra to sing ‘Rawhide’ and were harassed into buying gyoza (fried dumplings) in Gyoza Village (see the title of this blog entry).
One of my top five favourite things about Japan is that they put faces on everything. This is a picture of the Gyoza Village souvenir shop, with smiling gyoza stuffed toys.
In another souvenir shop, there was a place where you could buy cat driving licenses.
On the 60th of Sunshine City there is an awesome observatory. Being inside all day, it was a bit of a shock to find out there was an insane thunderstorm outside.
On the way home we found a pet shop selling a £250 pair of rabbits.
…and cat outfits.
This book shop in Ikebukuro sold tentacle porn and DVDs of 8 year old japanese girls playing with inflatable toys. A bit odd, but quite a lot of people in shirts and ties seemed to like it.
I came pretty close to buying a book about Paco Chan the noodle bird, but couldn’t really tell what it was about.
Since we couldn’t find anywhere that would let you stroke dogs, the next best thing was a cat café where you could pay £1 every ten minutes to hang out with cats. This was my pass, that I had to wear around my neck.
There were three computers, a Playstation and sofas and mattresses for people to hang out on, and at least 15 people came and went when we were there. I’ll be honest, I seriously hate cats but this guy was amazing.
Amazing neckerchief, but what this picture doesn’t really show you is that it had a really big head, but its face was squished into the bottom half of it.
Dan didn’t really seem to enjoy it that much at first but I’m pretty sure he wanted to take them all home with him by the time we left.
It was about 2200 by the time we got home. Dan has no money and I’m saving mine for kobe beef/an S&M bar/killer souvenirs so we stayed in, ate toast and watched Eastbound & Down.
I’m going out now for a Wa-fu chicken burger at KFC but, before I go, let me leave you with this picture of a small-eared cat in a bib.
