Our first free day in Tokyo started with a quick Starbucks run and a trip to a crepe shop. I got a tiramisu cream crepe and it was pretty good. The group then decided to go to Character Street at Tokyo Station where we bumped into a wild Sten wandering around Akihabara. He then joined us on our travels.

At Character Street, we shopped at all of the stores. I bought merch at the Jump store, Snoopy store, and a Quintessential Quintuplets pop up store. There were also other smaller stores where I bought my new favorite towel. It is a Haikyu towel of the character Kageyama Tobio and it says Ballin. They also had a Ghibli store and a pokemon center.

Afterwards, I headed back to the hotel with Sten and had a brief visit to Super Potato before heading back to the hotel. However, instead of resting, I had to find a coin laundry. I then found one on Google maps that was 11 minutes away and walked to it. Turns out, it was right next to a station one stop away from Akihabara so I went back to shop during the hour while my clothes were being washed. After picking up my clothes, I stopped off at a Thai restaurant for a quick early dinner.

At around 7:30, it was time for a maid cafe adventure with Sten and Steve. Since Jas and Jessica went to a cafe where the maids wore cat ears, we decided that it would be a great idea to approach any maid we saw but only if they were wearing cat ears. Immediately, Sten finds a cute maid in cat ears right outside our hotel and nonchalantly walked up to her and asked where her place was. The poor maid was in sheer terror as she probably had never met such a large and scary bald man with Yokai tatoos. After that, I was relegated to the duty of maid conversationalist as I am neither a large or scary bald man and I do not have Yokai tatoos. My ability to speak Japanese may have also been a deciding factor. Sten and Steve were lucky and had the job of pretending not to know me by hanging out in a nearby store to not scare the maid. After talking to a few maids, I struck a meaningful conversation with a maid and she offers to show me the way to her cafe. I call over Sten and Steve which surprisingly did not scare her off. She leads us up into a slightly suspicious bar with brightly colored and expensive looking alcohol where we quickly make our way out the door. We later found the maid cafe where Jas and Jessica went the day before. At the beginning, they served us Tokyo Mew Mew water where upon drinking it, you would turn into a cat! After turning into cats, we then enjoyed overpriced and aggressively mediocre deserts and soft drinks served by the maids in cat ears. We also got our pictures taken at the end.

With that experience in the books, what could possibly top this?

To be continued…