The first thing that I had wanted to see was the Yebisu Beer Museum, conveniently located in the Tokyo district of Ebisu (I'm becoming quite the expert of navigating myself around the Tokyo subway now ... the multitude of lines and colours don't scare me anymore). The Yebisu Beer Museum is also home to one of the four largest beer companies in Japan, Sapporo Breweries. The other big three are the Australian imported Asahi, Kirin and Suntory.
Let the beer games begin!
The beer museum was exactly what is expected of a museum, lots of old looking things, and displays of how their special beer is made. There was even a holographic fairy tale story about an evil joker stealing this magical amber liquid. This was a big Vat, where I guess once was part of the beer making process.
John and myself were overjoyed to find beer's as big as our appetites. Alas, it wasn't to be ... they tricked us and these giant beers turned out to be fakes!
In my next life, I think I would like to be a beer truck driver ... hmmm ... BEER!
The museum also had all their advertising posters over the years. I'm going to say that you can easily guess which years some of these posters came from. Check out this one with all the brightly coloured bathing suits, big hair and cheesy smiles.
The classical Audrey Hepburn style look and oh! She likes beer!
The traditional Japanese style advert. "Will this beer make me look fat in my kimono"
And finally the modern advert, hot lady, chest poking out and holding a big glass of beer! Doesn't it make you want to just run out and buy one ... the beer I mean!
This was the gallery itself with all the posters, Clarence and John are doing some critiquing of the artwork.
The many different flavours of Sapporo Beer.
What would any beer museum be without a tasting section. Unfortunately, the tasting was not free but it wasn't too expensive. You had to buy your tickets from this machine. Japan and their vending machines, there's one for everything, although I haven't found the one with the used underwear yet. John ... "I can't decide, so many to choose ... so little time!"
I went for the sampler selection which gave me four of their finest brews. It was dericious!
Next on the list was showing the boys the real Akihabara (or as one of my students told me, Akiba as known by the Japanese). On our first trip to Akiba, we could not find the geek town and neon lights show that we had heard of so many times. Fortunately I was shown where it was on another occasion and promptly became their guide to this this world where geeks are cool! Sorry, don't have any pics here but imagine this ... one great long strip of highrise buildings, covered in neon lights ... people walking down both sides of the street shoulder to shoulder. Store after store of electronics, manga, amusement parlours ... restaurants ... and the occasional young Japanese girl freezing as she is dressed as a maid!
The other thing I had to try out was a prison restaurant that I had heard about from my fellow JETS. Stories of being hand-cuffed by leather clad prison guards and led to your cell, games of russian roulette with food where the wrong trigger could lead you to a mouthfull of volcanic burning sensations. Sounds like a riot! So we made our reservation, and headed to find this place which was apparently not so easy. I must mention that Japanese streets are awful to navigate through ... there are no street signs and building don't have any numbers ... so maps are useless most of the times. But, we managed to stumble our way there. Word of advice, if you are ever lost in Japan, the best people to ask are staff in convenience stores ... sometimes they may know a little English but will happily step outside to point you in the right direction.
So into the restaurant we went, and as with any popular restaurant, a dude with a headset greeted us and made sure there was a cell large enough for us. As we entered the dark entrance and follow the only path available ... dummies in electric chairs would light up, exploding bins would blow up and crazy laughter would echo around us. We finally got to another door and sure enough there was a tall slim Japanese lady in her tightly leather clad prison uniform. She offered to handcuff one of us ... John was to be the lucky man and we were lead to our cell down a catacomb of tunnels. Some of the cells were tiny, enough for a table and two people. Our cell was on the larger scale and separated by some bars into the next cell.
This particular prison restaurant was called "The Lock Up". Food wasn't so prison like with your normal selection from any typical Izakaya. You had your salads, pizza, pasta, rice, noodles and medley of fried delights.
This was our cell. For entertainment, at one particular point in the night, the lights were switched off and then starting flashing on and off ... prompting epileptic fits for some people. They then had one crazy dude busting into each cell and scaring the daylights out of those sitting by the door. Clarence and Keebs got quite a fright. The lady prison guards, who didn't look like they could take down a Chihuahua then ran around trying to round up the escaped convicts. It was mildly entertaining, I must say.
The drinks were the highlight of this place. Here's Mike with his ensemble of test tube mixtures.
Here's my particular selection, with a nice powdery packet to accompany it. The drinks were cool, even if the were a bit derived of alcohol.
Are you meant to sniff this?
The other thing on our checklist to do while in Tokyo was to visit a maid cafe. As the name suggests, these are cafe's were girls dress in maid outfits and serve you like you are their master. Its meant to be like any other cafe, only that the waitress is waiting on you constantly. some examples include kneeling down to mix your sugar and milk or giving hand and feet massages. There are stories where certain maid cafes have photo rooms and you can have the maids dress up in your favourite manga characters. Unfortunately, it was about 11pm when we returned to Akihabara and most of geek town had shut down. We did find a maid bar that was open. So we entered and paid the exorbitant table charge of 2000 yen and an extra 800yen for a beer. As expected the bar waitress was in a maid outfit and was super hot. There was no exemplary service here but she did hang around to speak with us ... lucky she knew some English, otherwise the conversations would have been really short. No photos here either as they would have costs 1000yen each. I'll pass on this one, I think.
Finally, our last endeavour was to try Japan's famous capsule hotel. These coffin like rooms didn't turn out to be so bad after all. I haven't been in a coffin but I'd say the capsule is probably more spacious. I could comfortable sit up in my capsule and could fully stretch out. Even the bigger boys like Clarence and John didn't find it too uncomfortable.
Get ready to enter the capsule!
They provide you with a locker and bathing facilities and oh, these sexy robes to sleep in. There's a thin bamboo curtain that you just pull down to ensure privacy. Inmate No. 326 ... "lights out"
This is basically the layout of the capsules ... the top one is the way to go. The sleep was quite comfortable and barring the 9.30am wake up call over the loud speaker to get the hell out of their hotel by 10am ... it was a cool experience. Although at 4000 yen a night ... its not the cheapest place to stay.
