Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 10 - Last Day)

There's technically one more day after this in the trip, but all that happens in it is that we take the train back to Kanazawa and find everything pretty much how we left it, so this is the final entry in the Spring Break 2010 series of posts. We do a few different things in Tokyo, some of which are probably interesting enough to be worth mentioning.

First, we slept in until just almost lunchtime. That's probably not that interesting. Moving on, we got ready to head out into the city and made a plan for the different things we were going to do, then started moving in the direction of doing them.

First up, after grabbing a snack, was a trip out to a chocolate shop that Ana had heard of and wanted to go see. It was a little trippy. It's called the 100% Chocolate Cafe, and their gimmick is they have 56 main flavors of chocolate, including chocolate made from beans from all over the world, so they have a Brazilian chocolate and a Peruvian chocolate and so forth for fifteen other cocoa bean producing countries. After that they have several pretty conventional mixes - milk and dark and super dark and chocolate with honey and nuts, before getting into stranger areas with tea chocolate and herb chocolate and things I can't even remember. They also do a monthly selection with a unique chocolate every day, and these ones tend to be really off the wall. They gave us a free sample of white chocolate with honey and thyme mixed in with our order, and it was edible but I'm glad it was free. Ana got a really high end hot chocolate (orange chocolate with cracked black pepper, yum!) and we both bought a couple of conventional chocolates for later and headed out. I don't need to go back.

They had enormous pieces of their main flavors in a glass case across the back of the cafe.

Edible...but not much more

Next up was the cat cafe. Before we get going, a cat cafe is a place where you can basically go to hang out with cats and eat. There's demand for this kind of thing in Tokyo because most families just don't have space for any pets at all, and might not be allowed to have them by their apartment complex's rules anyway. After reading about these places on the internet we wanted to go and just sort of marvel at the Japanese-ness of it, and also Ana is deeply fond of pretty much all things cute and fuzzy and wanted to play with the kitties, we we'd resolved to do this the next time we were in Tokyo.

We technically weren't going to a real cat cafe because we'd chosen one that focused on the cat aspect and excluded the food aspect, as the combination is more expensive and weirds us out, but it still falls into the general category of cat cafe for lack of a better term. Anyway, the place is called Nekobukuro (which is supposed to be a clever combination of the word for cat, neko, and the name of the neighborhood it is in, Ikebukuro) and it is on the top of a department store, probably as a way to drive foot traffic.

When you walk up the stairs that lead to Nekobukuro, a version of "Up On The Housetop" rendered into Japanese by synthetic cat voices plays. The words are probably different but the tune is unmistakable. That was pretty strange.

Nekobukuro entrance

We paid our entry fee (discounts for couples - it appeared to be mostly kids and teenagers on dates) and ventured in. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking, but most of the cats really didn't want anything to do with the people there, and the ones that would actually let you touch them seemed closer to being sedated or totally non-responsive, except when the staff handed out cat treats and then it was blood in the water in front of sharks. I don't think they try to select cats that like people, which is strange. I guess I'm glad we went to see it but the whole thing was kind of sad. It looked like the animals were being treated well and the whole place was clean but the people were there to play with cats and the cats didn't want to play...

There were cat walkways along the walls and across the ceiling. The "Cat Train" in the back is a rest zone where they store cats where they can be seen but not harassed.

I think everyone would correctly identify this as from Japan without further context.

After leaving the cats to the attentions of the Japanese children we went down to a used English bookstore. It was a nice store, with a wide and interesting selection, but prices were too high to really pig out on reading materials. We both got a few things that interested us at prices we were willing to pay, but I'd have had half the store if it were cheap enough. I'm trying to stretch them out instead of finishing them all at once - new, interesting English books are a real treat and especially ones using advanced or elegant English are wonderful as a morale boost compared to the slow and broken English and Japanese mishmash we use to be understood with non-fluent coworkers and the public.

Minds fed, we went for less metaphorical food, first at National Azabu supermarket. We bought two 64oz peanut butters as a friend had requested one and we were low too, and a few other treats that can't be had in Kanazawa. After Azabu we needed dinner, and met up with my relative again and headed over to Helmsdale, the whiskey pub in Hiroo that we've mentioned before, where the fish and chips and burgers remained as good as we'd remembered and there were still ~297 whiskeys yet to be tried.

We tested four whiskeys this time..293 to go. This one was laid down six years before I was born. My relative turned out to have some interest and experience in whiskey so we had a good time and Ana tolerated us while drinking good cider with her fish and chips.

So, thanks for reading my inordinately lengthy documentation of our trip. I think we have a couple of short entries coming up after these, covering a day trip in cherry blossom season and a few things done for science. The next big trip is actually coming up fast as Golden Week (Japan shuts down for a few days in early May) is nearly upon us and we're going to camp on an island off Hiroshima Bay (the campsite costs 50x less than hotels) and visit the city, the Atomic Bomb museum, some of the most famous shrines in Japan, and on the way back one of the three most famous gardens in Japan. Between the one in Okayama that we're visiting and Kenroku'en here there will only be one left of the big three. Should be a good time and at the least it will certainly be adventurous. Might be a while until those posts start going up though, don't get too excited too early lest ye be disappointed.