Expedition to the Maid Cafe

As I wasn’t feeling up to describing yesterday’s events, well, yesterday, I’ll cover both yesterday and today in this post.

Yesterday…nothing out of the ordinary in class. Watched the first episode of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure in my Pop Culture class, which was pretty cool. Every so often our teacher would pause the episode and explain a certain word or phrase that someone said, which was helpful. During my lunch break, I found a manga/anime shop that I ended up being able to explore more in depth today. More on that later.

The most interesting part of the day was a sightseeing tour that the school offered. Unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera with me that day, so I don’t have pictures. I’m planning on going back maybe on the weekend or something to take pictures, though. Anyway, we went to Ohori Kouen, which is a nearby park. The name means, roughly, Great Moat Park, as it was built over the ruins of an old castle. The moat still exists today, however. Every time I hear the name Ohori Kouen, though, I think of Otori Kyouya, the name of an anime character. Inside the park we visited a Japanese-style garden which was, in truth, beautiful. I’ll leave it up to your imagination until I go back to get pictures. Sorry.

Our tour guide was a Fukuoka resident named Takahiro Nagano. Though he said he was 30 years old when asked, he could’ve easily passed for being in his early 20s in my opinion. We talked for a quite a while, though a lot of it was me asking “what do you call this in Japanese?” to try and expand my vocabulary. After walking through the park, we headed to a nearby shrine. I unfortunately don’t recall the name, however. There was a lookout point that had a spectacular view of the city, but again, I didn’t have my camera with me.

Something interesting happened on the way to the shrine, though. We’re walking down the street and there’s a group of high school girls standing on the sidewalk by where we’re walking. That’s normal, I see them pretty often. As we approach, I hear one of them call out “Hora!” (which is more or less like “Hey!”) in a louder than normal voice. It wasn’t really my business and I didn’t want to gawk, so I was trying not to look at them. I noticed that a couple of them were looking at us, though. That’s not too out of the ordinary, though, since there really aren’t many foreigners here. I notice people glancing at me a lot. Anyway, after we’re a little ways away Takahiro turns to me and says “Those girls wanted to talk to you. They were just too shy to say anything.” I just kind of responded with some sort of “Oh, really” comment, but inside I was wondering what in the world they could have wanted to say to me. I couldn’t go back because at that point it would’ve been awkward to walk back there and ask if they wanted something. Even if he was right, I know it probably would’ve been something inconsequential, but it’s going to haunt me for the rest of my days. Fate might have been knocking at my door and I might have slammed the door in its face.

Alas.

———–

Today was pretty fun. Class was interesting and I learned a bunch of new words, notably stuff relating to the ocean and diving. We read some apparently true story about a mailbox on the sea floor in some prefecture near Osaka where you can scuba dive down and mail some sort of special waterproof postcard.

The highlight of the day, again, was my pop culture class: we visited the maid cafe Tenjin Style (Tenjin is the name of the downtown area of Fukuoka). A maid cafe is, as its name implies, a cafe where the waitresses are all dressed in French maid outfits. Unfortunately, the cafe didn’t allow photography. I dunno. In my opinion it wasn’t anything terribly special, but the maid costumes were kinda novel. The waitresses were indeed cute, though. I suppose the most entertaining part was how we had to talk to one of the waitresses as part of a “report” we had to do. We each had to ask at least one question (there were three other students). Maid cafes largely appeal largely to the otaku community (otaku: Japanese slang for geek/nerd/enthusiast), so the waitresses are all familiar with recent anime/manga/games. The cafe had little photo albums with profiles of the different waitresses with what sort of things they like and such. I was impressed by how knowledgable the waitress we talked to, whose name was Hinata, was about those sort of things. I asked her what she liked to do on her free time and she responded that she enjoyed watching videos on Nicovideo, which is the Japanese equivalent of Youtube. The rest of the discussion was stuff about the cafe and such. I believe she said that there were about 20 waitresses total, which was kinda surprising. Also, I somehow ended up getting a Tenjin Style points card. I can’t read enough of the Japanese on the back of the card to figure out what happens if I fill it up, though. It seems like I’d need to spend about $200 to fill it.

The other highlight of today was the aforementioned anime/manga store. It was really cool for me, but its contents are likely not your cup of tea. Regardless, here are some pictures of merchandise relevant to my interests:
Vending machines outside the store
Remixed video game music CDs
Novelization of a game series I enjoy
Anime theme song single
First volume of a book series whose anime adaptation I like a lot

Other random pictures:
Poster for Angels and Demons
Cool fountain clock
Local church
Mass schedule
Church exterior
A small bit of Engrish
Astro Boy statue at my school
Hiragana chart in my classrom
Aforementioned classroom
A sign to keep out of some sort of reservoir right next to my house.
Something interesting to note in that last picture is the creature that’s grabbing the child. Although it looks like a turtle, it’s actually a mythical Japanese creature known as a Kappa. In short, they’re river-dwelling creatures that enjoy cucumbers and sake.　The main text reads: “DANGER! Swimming or playing in this vicinity is forbidden.”