A difficult second day

DAN

The word of the day would have to be bureaucracy.

Today we visited Shinjuku, which seems to be the shopping capital of Tokyo. It's an immense place, filled with people and light and colour. The sense of scale is just so large that it seems like it will never end. Every corner you turn leads to a road that is filled ten stories high with lights and adverts.

Japanese computer games came to mind when walking around it. There are so many hidden gems in hard to reach places (a cafe filled with cats on the 9th floor of a non-descript building, reached by a small lift in a shady alleyway? More on that later). You could easily walk past a hundred treasures and not realise it. It reminded me of Dark Souls (and other games like it), where there are secrets around every corner and counter-intuitive ways of doing things that will give unexpected results. I can imagine a game where you go around tokyo finding the most interesting vending machine items that you can. It seems that this aspect of Japanese life has inspired the secret finding in their games. There really is that feeling that you will constantly be surprised. It can get quite exhausting.

The hugeness

In the midst of the immense crowds we went to shinjuku station to get our rail passes and tickets for hiroshima. This was so hilariously officious that I laughed out loud a couple of times. The list of requirements for the japan rail pass is just crazy. We were standing at the desk watching the lady go over our documents for about 20 minutes in the most oppressive heat imaginable. The rail pass staff had a special cooling system that just didn't extend over to the customers waiting at the desk. It was fun leaning over as far as you could to get some cold air in your face without the lady getting angry. So we stood there with the sweat droplets pouring down our backs, watching the lady make a show of stamping and ticking our documents literally a hundred times. I wonder if there is a youtube video of the process.

After the train station we went on the hunt for one of the best ramen restaurants in Tokyo. It's name is Fuunji. This ended up being a real task. Trying to find a small ramen joint that doesn't have the name in English on the outside in this dense jungle of restaurants and shops was a bit of a nightmare. When we got there it was 20 minutes before closing and we are all a bit hot and pissed off.

I tried to catch the bubbling noodle water at Fuunji, but it mostly eluded me

One of the customers really helped us out with the whole process of getting meal tickets and ordering,  so getting the actual noodles was the easiest part. The next problem us that Flo doesn't like noodles (yay!) And Emma was full after about half of her meal. So we were sitting in the restaurant with a "best ramen of 2014" trophy on the wall with two half finished bowls on the table after coming in late. I don't think we'll be winning the best customers of 2015 award, that's for sure. I tried my best to wolf down the rest of the noodles, but it was like a torture from greek mythology, where a glutton has to force feed himself the finest food until he feels sick.

As night fell things unfortunately got worse, rather than better.

We had decided to take Flo to a manicure and nail painting place, but when we got there they were all booked up for the next 10,000 years. So we decided to go the "cat cafe" that we had heard so much about. When we got there they told us that children under 12 years old weren't allowed in. Of course not. We didn't lie fast enough, so we had to slink off elsewhere. Here's a quick tip for any travellers to Japan - lie fast and often. Read ahead for where ever you are going and if there are criteria that you don't meet then lie through your teeth.

A hidden food market on the tenth floor of a department store

As you can imagine, by this point Flo was a little dissapointed and well... teary. Jet lag, crowds and masses of flashing lights can be difficult for a kid to handle. To make Flo feel better we decided to go to a cat cafe that definitely did accept kids.

So we travelled about 30 minutes on the tube to Ikebukuro, what must be one of the seedier districts in Tokyo. Ikebukuro feels like a smaller, stranger version of Shinjuku. There are many young women dressed as school girls who's company you can buy for about ¥5000 (£30) per hour. Just the right kind of area for a kids cat cafe.

In an alley on the edge of town we found the cat cafe. The card directing us to the cafe said that it closed at 11, but the staff told us that it closed at 10. It was 9.35.

The cat cafe itself was very odd, with a couple of chubby men dressed up in business attire rolling around on the floor playing with cats and a young couple in the corner, obiously on a date.  The whole thing was looked over by a sinister man in a face mask and apron. There were probably about ten cats stretching themselves out in different parts of the room. After the seeing all the young girls posing out in the street it felt kind of like we were in a cat brothel.

Flo was in her element, which I was glad of, but unfortunately I find cats literally poisonous, so I had to sit on a cushion and hope none of them came near me. I did strike up a conversation with the sinister looming man though. His name was Shinji and he was actually really nice. He'd started the cat cafe 7 years ago after studying marketing in London. He wore the mask because he had slowly become allergic to cats and it was the only way he could cope.

It turns out that the large number of 'pet cafes' have sprung up because most Tokyo residents live in such small apartments that they can't keep pets of their own. It's a little bit sad, but maybe it's more than having to look after a pet day in, day out. The cats seemed to be very happy anyway, which is more than I can say for me by the end of this trying day.

End of day frazzlement