ikebukuro

Blogging From a Cat Cafe

Factorial , , , , , ,

It gets hot in Tokyo.

暑い。
暑い。

Before you dismiss that picture above as just a screenshot of a weather app, please, read it. Look at that stuff:

  1. There is 62% humidity and no chance at all that it will rain.
  2. It’s 91°F (33°C) and it feels like 99°/37°.
  3. It’s only July.

And I can vouch for that “feels like” bit, too. In the train station (where you don’t feel that 17mph wind), it literally feels like a sauna.

But enough about the weather. Speaking only an idiot’s version of the language and knowing practically no one here, it gets lonely in Tokyo too.  I’m an introvert, and something of a loner too, but I’ve surprised myself by how difficult that level of alienation can be at times.

So today I’m treating myself to 3 hours at 猫の居る休憩所２９９ (neko no iru kyuukeisho 299, or “Rest Area 299, Where There Are Cats”).

Cat cafes - where being ignored by the other living beings around you is half the fun.
Cat cafes – where being ignored by the other living beings around you is half the fun.

Here’s what things look like as I write this:

Pretty nice. Also, here’s a cat licking my plastic bag. Some cats are into this sort of thing, including my kitty at home in America.

Weirdos.

By the way, just outside of Ikebukuro Station, I found a warp pipe:

I figure I could skip straight to Osaka if I got in this thing and crouched down.
I figure I could skip straight to Osaka if I got in this thing and crouched down.

 

Namja Town

Factorial , , , ,

Recently I went to Sunshine City, Tokyo’s oldest “city within a city” and visited Namco Namja Town. Namja Town is a “theme park,” although usually when I hear that phrase I think of a place with roller coasters. This place turned out to be more of a children’s attraction, with the ever-present claw games, some game where kids ran around scanning random objects with a big plastic scanner thingy looking for ghosts, and a few video games.

Yet despite it’s roller coaster deficit, I was not disappointed, for I came with only two attractions in mind: Gyoza Stadium and Ice Cream City.

Gyoza Stadium's eating area
Gyoza Stadium’s eating area

In case you don’t know, gyoza are also called pot-stickers or dumplings and they are delicious. I know the place isn’t much to look at in the pictures. But if you know me then I can put it this way: gyoza are stuffed full of cabbage and often onions and I don’t even know what else and don’t care because I will eat 3 dozen of them if you fry them and put them in front of me with some ponzu sauce.

These little guys in this cheap little paper box with that cheap little tin plate for the tiny tiny bottle of ponzu sauce were AMAZING.
These little guys–in this cheap little paper box, with that cheap little tin plate for the tiny tiny bottle of ponzu sauce–were AMAZING.

And I had ice cream from one of the half dozen ice cream vendors in Ice Cream City.

Lots and lots…
…of ice cream flavors to choose from.

I ordered six flavors from this menu:

Which 6 would you choose?
Which 6 would you choose?

My choices, from left to right, top row first:

My ice cream

  1. #1 Golden vanilla (delicious, but still just vanilla ice cream)
  2. #3 Hokkaido shirataki potato ice cream (incredibly good, had little tiny bits of potato in it that melted in your mouth with the rest of the ice cream)
  3. #11 Double cheese (my favorite of the bunch, how did they make cheese taste even better?)
  4. #25 Homemade ice cream corn (corn flavored ice cream, believe it or not my second favorite of the bunch
  5. #30 Milk (yes, milk flavored ice cream. not sure how that works, but it did taste more like milk than the rest. also delicious of course)
  6. #50 Whisky (the whisky flavor was abundant and really not very good. you can taste this at home by just taking a sip of whisky with a bite of vanilla ice cream.)