Tokyo Dec - Akiba Trip @Home Cafe Maid Cafe Visit

Yes, I still have stuff from my trip to Tokyo before Christmas that I haven't blogged yet!  (I rushed to get the m-flo videos up,  now I finally have time for the rest!)

On my second day in Japan the week before Christmas,  I promised Shimizu-san a follow-up to our Akihabara experience the month before.  This time I took him to the famous 'At Home Cafe', ( seen first here) a chain that now occupies the top four floors of one building in Akihabara with another location in the Don Quixote where AKB 48 have their theater.

Last time I came with Ayako in October, we went to their 'Hana' traditional Japanese style branch, this time we went for the original.

As shown last time I was here, they have a well developed stamp card system.  Depending on how many stamps you get, you can 'level up': Bronze -> Silver -> Gold, etc.  Each comes with some sort of title too: "Level 1 Master", "Familiar Master", "Eminent Master", etc.  

When Shimizu and I arrived there was a 5 minute wait for seats so the maid collected my card to hold our place in line.  My card is Bronze of course, but the guy behind us in line had a BLACK card... if you look closely in that picture, Black level takes 2000 stamps! (which means you either came 2000 times, or you spent enough to get multiple stamps per visit!

But still, do the math... this place has only been around for about 3 years, that's only about 1050 days!  to get to 2000 stamps you have to be coming here a LOT!

That last time Shimizu and I came to a different cafe in Akiba, we had quite a bit of fun giving the maid a tricky task for the service they provide with certain orders -- where they draw a picture on the dish when they serve it ( here's a classic example).  This time I was stumped for subject matter, so Shimizu suggested a portrait:

it looks more like me than my passport photo! :-D

Because we were there a few days before Christmas, they had some special Christmas decorations up and the maids were also all dressed in christmas themed costumes.  I've mentioned in the past about how these places also charge customers to take instant photos with the maids.  

Apparently here they normally will only let you take one-on-one pictures (aka a 'two shot' in Japanlish). But for the holiday period they allow you to take group pictures with multiple maids. (Keep in mind you pay based on the # of maids in the pic, not by the picture!)

It was quite amazing, during the time we were there, it was pretty much an unending stream of phototaking (to the point where there's a waitlist for certain maids so they can still get actual work done between photo ops).

Some were conventional maid cafe style pics, and some were rather strange. Case in point:

Yes, I couldn't fit it into one picture, but basically it was two girls posing in front of the tree while the Otaku stalks them from behind...  

I should have totally taken one like that!   In my case I don't usually bother with the photos anymore, but for the sake of my blog (and because it makes a great christmas card), I shelled out for a 3P!

Pose wise, I went for something a little more conventional... but everyone loves the cat pose. :-P

Actually if you analyze it a bit, it seems as if they make crazymoney off the photos (almost to the point where the cafe stuff is just an excuse to get you to stick around between photos....)  -- while we were there one guy took not one, but TWO pictures with FIVE maids... that comes out to be about US$30 per picture at the current exchange rate.  And the even more scary thought, some of the geeky customers were showing eacother entire photo albums full of pages and pages of these pictures (figure the average cost is ~US$5-6, that means they've invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into this-- on top of the normal cafe fees).

Anyway, Shimizu and I enjoyed ourselves immensely, and there is talk about doing the next AnD Tokyo meet up here...  AND I'm only two stamps away from getting my silver card too! :-P