Jan 12th – Bit of a slow morning as had to sort some things out for the return trip, namely arranging my transfer to the Airport for the next day. Skipped the hotel breakfast – safer option.

Met up with Ferlyn at Akihabara in the afternoon, and the weather was horrid, rainy and windy and very cold. Exactly what we didn’t want for wandering around outside. After a bit of battling through the crowd of umbrellas, we arrived at our first stop the @Home Cafe – this was huge, 3 floors of Maid cafe, and each one has a different theme. The queue was incredible, went down the stairs 3 floors. Decided not to wait and were about to go when we found the lowest floor of @Home had a traditional Japanese style theme – and NO Queue! So we went in. I can see why this place was so popular, really good decor, the costumes were really good and the service was great. We were lucky enough to catch (and be part of) a game of paper scissors stone – I was out first round, Ferlyn got to the second, eventually it came down to 2 very nervous Japanese gentlemen, who then had to compete up in the centre with the Maids. Was all good fun, even if I couldn’t remember the sequence of actions properly lol.

We had a desert and I got a green tea, which the maid prepared in front of us – then came the adding of the love – we had to perform this ritual before being allowed to enjoy the tea, it basically consisted of bringing your hands together to form a heart shape, then saying a couple of words in Japanese, and all 3 of us had to do it at once – the purpose is to add love into the tea to make it extra special. Took a couple of attempts, mainly down to me again not quite getting the sequence right, but after it must have worked – faith – as the tea was great. We also had to partake similar rituals of adding love for each item ordered, and for our desert the maid would pour the source on, but would only stop upon making the correct “mew mew” sound. The cute cat theme was present in other areas, such as part of the paper scissors stone sequence involved a couple of cat like actions, including making of cat ears on our head, all very cute and was good fun.

Then we had a look round one of the big stores which sells like everything, spent a bit of time there looking in the costume section – so many different ones and such amazing designs. Also had a look at the other @Home cafe in there, again big queue, and quite a bit smaller. Then we had dinner at a Okonomiyaki restaurant, and this was quite different from what I’d tried before, but we had 2 different dishes and both were really good, also very filling and couldn’t eat all of it, but glad to have tried it before I left Japan. Then it was time to head back, and took the JR line back to Shinagawa.

Didn’t take any photos that day as the rain and wind were so bad, so here’s a random photo of Ferlyn (on the left) as a maid from back in March at Cosafe. Actually its not random, I love this photo 🙂

The second photo is from Christmas Eve at Cosafe (Ferlyn in red), for more Cosafe photos see this post.