On our third day in Japan, we headed out to Akihabara!
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| more explanation on this later! haha |
In the itinerary that I planned, we scheduled wake up time of around 8 am to make sure that we would have plenty of time to make it to the @home cafe (maid cafe) for breakfast. @home cafe opens at 10am, and with our Airbnb being about an hour away it gave us just enough time to catch the opening.
I may have explained this briefly in my previous video or post but I recently became very interested in some of the maids working at @home cafe. I went to the @home cafe website to check out the maids before I went and found that they have an extensive list of information about the maids, photos, and links to their Twitter accounts.
The main maid I became interested in is named Arthur. You can find her Twitter account here.
Here is our video!
There are two locations for @home cafe, one of which is above a Don Quijote. If you head up to the 5th floor you can find the maid cafe after circling around the corner and following the cute pink wallpaper. When we arrived it was a bit too early so we looked around a bit before forming a small line. By the time the cafe opened, there was a line of about 5 people that consisted of middle-aged men, Vincent and myself.
I was surprised to see that they automatically matched us with a maid that spoke English to try and accommodate us. Her name is Pikapi and she was really kind to us, offering to explain everything in English. I explained that I was really excited to see Arthur and was wondering if I could request her. I then found out the system this particular maid cafe operates on: you get to choose the maid you take a photo with (if you buy a photo set) and for the other activities such as writing on your food or making your water 'moe moe', it's done by whatever maid is free at the moment to do so.
I was pretty disappointed by this at first because I really wanted Arthur to do everything but I found that this was a really good way to get to know the other maids! We got to spend more time talking to Pikapi who was very charming! She hasn't made a Twitter yet but when she does I'm definitely going to link it.
I decided to go light on the food because I expected to go to another maid cafe at around noon to see another maid I liked so I just ordered a dessert set. Vincent ordered the omurice and asked Pikapi if she could draw him on top of the rice in ketchup. She did an awesome job!
After having such a great and personal experience, I was hyped up to get to the next maid cafe. Another maid I liked named Cammy was scheduled to work at noon so I ran over there to see if she could serve me. Since that store is the main location, it was significantly more busy than the one in Don Quijote, and Cammy didn't have much time to serve us. I felt a little disappointed, but I tried to use this time to scout out more cute maids to follow on Twitter.
I also learned they had an app, and I'm obsessed with it already.
Overall I'm really over the moon with my maid cafe experience and would recommend it in a heartbeat (if you speak Japanese). I will say that the price isn't cheap, about 5000 yen in total for a basic dessert and food set (2 people). But it is an experience unlike any other, and you're paying for the experience!
After our meals from both maid cafes, we headed over to Taito Station to do some gaming and take our first purikura! Purikura is Japanese sticker photobooths that dispense cute, often themed photos! The one we did cost 400 yen and we got to get 2 digitally downloaded for free (one of which you saw above). The rest of the shots we took shown in the video are stickers that we currently carry in our wallets. As soon as I get back to America I've gotta scan it!
After purikura, I really wanted Vincent to get a taste of Karaoke so we headed over to Karaoke Kan to do some singing. We originally signed up for one hour but we had so much fun we extended it to two! I hope you can enjoy our terrible singing, I've put it at the end of the video for your listening pleasure! haha
All in all, we had a really fun day in Akihabara and would love to do it again!
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