You Have To Go To The Monster Cafe

Ebi-kun and I decided to go for a mooch around Harajuku the other day, he has never really been which is ridiculous since he is 11 and lives just over an hour away - it's only right that he understands why the rest of the world thing that the Japanese are a little bit mad!

I asked around for somewhere cool to go for lunch and one of the suggestions was the Kawaii Monster Cafe - I googled it and clicking through to the website was enough for me to be convinced we needed to visit.

We arrived about midday and expected a long wait but we were the first in line and just had to wait 5 minutes or so whilst they finished the show. I'll post a video at the bottom to show how truely crazy the place was!

Have a guess what this is....

It's the sink in the bathroom!

As you can see it's somewhat like Willy-Wonkers Chocolate Factory inside, completely over the top! Brilliant! It is a total sensory overload - the music is quite load and you have a feeling of chaos in there.

The menu is bought to you on an ipad, took us a while to realise that you can order through the ipad, you call the waitress over! Most of the staff spoke English at some level and it was packed with non-Japanese.

We went for the fries with dips - which were not as we expected them to be, Blue - sour cream, orange - cheese, green - wasabi, yellow - mustard, red - salsa.

Ebi-kun had an interesting drink which came with two test tubes, you had to pour the contents into the glass but in a specific order...

We also ordered chicken in chocolate sauce, which I admit sounds pretty grim but it was absolutely delicious!

And we had a "candy salad" not candy inside, it was a noraml healthy salad! We shared the dishes and it just about did us, we decided to get desert somewhere else a bit later. The food and drinks were all lovely, price was pretty standard but you do have to pay a seating charge of ¥500 per person, which pushes the price up.

We were also stung at the end, the staff do a show on the carousel then at the end they invite you up for photos. I didn't see the sign until it was too late... you have to pay ¥500 for the pleasure and you get a jelly lolly to help soften the blow - learn from my mistake!

All in all it was a good laugh, not somewhere we would go more than once unless we were taking friends. It's worth a visit for sure. As you leave there is also a small shop so you can buy souvenirs too.

This is the website, it's worth going to check it out! http://kawaiimonster.jp/pc/

And the video, it's a bit mad!

Poking Around in Shibuya

When I was looking for somewhere to spend out art date I spotted a free Damien Hurst exhibit, I figured it would only be small as it was free so kept it as a back up. From the map it looked like the place was just behind the station, it wasn't too hard to find! It was in the creative space on the 8th floor of the Hachi building.

before we found Damien's work, we came across a small exhibit of Japanese puppets, we had fun deciding what the puppets were thinking...

Then we found the Damien Hurst room, there were just a handful of prints, personally, not impressed. Especially after just seeing Murakami's work Hurst looked like a 5 years olds doodles in comparison.

We had a wander around the rest of the floor, there was a food exhibit for the 47 prefectures, not a lot going on to be honest but the set up was nice.

Then we decided to go and find something to eat and went down to the basement, the floor with all the omiyage, one thing Japan does so well is the displays... look at this chocolate...

And these were all spices, we actually spent a lot of time wandering around oooing and ahhhing but didn't buy anything! There did look like some nice cafes and restaurants on the 7th floor too, maybe we will check them out next time!