Monogatari Series Sega Collabo Café in Akihabara

It's been a while since my last blog post! Won't tell you I'll write more, it would probably be a lie, but here's a report on the Monogatari Series Sega Collabo Café in Akihabara I went to today!

The cafe was on the 5th floor of the SEGA arcade that's right outside of the Akihabara JR station. We got there a bit earlier and had time to check the corridor and the shop outside of the café, it was nice enough, with the TV playing a pretty neat loop.... having some (triggering) voice lines bringing with them strong emotions from the series.








The Café room itself was pretty, nice. I was surprised to see so few people, but we went on sunday night of the 4th week.
Each table had a different character on it, you can see the Shinobu one here, which was the cutest one, you can also see most of the others in the full album.



The walls were filled with pretty nice Images from the characters and screenshots from the show.... I'd actually like to have this as my room's wall paint! Some TVs were also playing a couple of clips from the series. Of course, OPs and EDs from the shows played in the background.







There was also a nice display of Character cutouts on a stage. You can see a picture of all the cutouts individually on the album.



A common thing about these collabo café is the character themed food, and the goods you get when ordering them, this Café was obviously similar. While the drinks were soso, the main food looked pretty nice and tasted good. The dessert were also pretty good. An interesting thing is that the coaster iun this event were made of plastic instead of the usual cardboard, so they feel like they could actually be used without risking to damage them.













We learned at some point that you could actually scan the coaster in the left corner, and that if all coasters were scanned, there were some special image displayed by a projector.
Eventually, everyone in the room joined together to do it and we got these two images.
There might have been more, but there are the 2 we got to see.





On the other side of the room there was a white board (actually a glass) where people were invited to write messages on. I gave it a try but it turned pretty bad. However there was a lot of nice one one there.



Overall, this cafe was really nice. Probably one of the best I've been to. There's 1 more week of it, so if I have time I'll try to go again!

If you want to see more pictures from the event, you can see them on the full album here!

Monogatari Series and Hello Kitty Collaboration Café

This month, the café The Guest in Shibuya hosted a Monogatari Series and Hello Kitty Collaboration Café.
A bunch of really cute art was released because of it, and they had some special menu items, you can read about it here unless they remove the page when it's over.

I'm a huge Monogatari fan, I love the story, and the characters, so I couldn't miss this.
So I went there 2 weeks ago.... and I was greeted by this:

What this means is, there's a 1:30 waiting line to get inside...
I couldn't wait unfortunately, so I gave up.....

Until today.
In Japan December 23 is a holiday, the Emperor's Birthday. So I didn't work today, and I went there, decided to go inside, however long that waiting line would be because the cafe ends on the 25, and there's no day off for Christmas here, so this is my last chance.... today being a holiday, I was sure it was going to be a long line... I was still surprised when I saw this however:

5 hours waiting time... That seemed way too long but fortunately, probably because the line would have been too long, they were giving numbers, and taking our phone numbers, and said they would call me when it would be my turn.

So I went and spent 5 hours in Shibuya...
Shibuya is kinda boring, after 1 hour I finished checking Mandarake (not enough space and too many people(, and Animate. Wandered a a little, but Shibuya get's boring pretty fast. 5 hours is too long...
so I went to the Karaoke.

Then the Cafe called me while I was walking out of the Karaoke, perfect timing, it was time to finally go to that cafe I really didn't want to miss!

First thing they do when you get there is ask you what you're gonna eat, once inside you can't change your order or order more. Unfortunately with Comiket coming soon, I didn't want to eat too much but I ordered the cute Donut plate (I realized later I was dumb and should have also ordered on of the sodas to get a coaster, but it was too late).
Then when your turn comes, you get inside, and you can take a picture with the cute Monogatari display there.

Look at that Shinobu, hnngggg so cute.
After that they made me choose a table-mat between a Hello Kitty and a monogatari one, of course I choose the Monogatari one. then they took me to my place where I waited while enjoying the view and my table-mat.

So Cute!

I was very careful all the time I was there, and I was able to bring the table-mat back home, now it's a poster on my wall.
Eventually my food got there, and that was a really cute plate indeed.

The doughnut was meh, as most japanese donuts are. The Ononoki thing was a mousse over a slice of pineapple, and the top part were cookies. It was kinda good. The best was the delicious Fondant Au Chocolat (not gonna use the English name, it's retarded) representing Mayoi-chan. The fruits on it with the hot chocolate inside tasted like a Chocolate fondue, and the cake part was good too.
Then there was 3 things left... the 3 Macaroon... which were way too cute to be eaten.

I must have stayed there contemplating them (and checking if my neighbor, who was also keeping them, would est them) for like 20 minutes. However as my time was running out (you could only stay for 1 hour in the café) I decided to eat them.

They were good, but I still felt bad about eating them lol.

The Café also had a lot of stuff on sale at their shop for the collaboration, and I bought a lot (too much, but not as much as I would have wanted), here's the loot from today:

That concludes my report on the Monogatari café. I'm glad I could go.
Oh, and for those who don't follow me on Google+, I made myself a little Christmas tree this week, and since with today's loot I have more stuff to put in it, it has been updated a little.
Here's my awesome Christmas tree!

That's all for this post. Good bye, and please keep checking this blog, Comiket is coming soon!

Album for today's pictures: (Google+/Picasa)

Comiket 86!

Here the comiket 86 post that should have been done 3 days ago!

From August 15th to the 17th, at the Tokyo Big Sight in Odaiba, the 86th Comiket was held.
As always, There was a crazy amount of people (total attendance of the week-end was 550,000 persons) and as always, it was way too damn hot!
For those who don't know Comiket... I've explained it before so go read there.

*This part of the post might be good information to anyone getting their hands on a circle ticket and who don't know how things will work with them)
This time I was really lucky and got my hands on a circle ticket (circle tickets are given to the members of the circles that will sell goods at the comiket so that they can enter earlier to set up their tables. Sometimes they have too many tickets so some people give it to their friends or sell them). So since I had a circle ticket I tough I wouldn't have to line up at all at first. While walking past the big lines outside I felt really happy to have this ticket. I had one worry though. I wanted to use this ticked to go close to the Corporate booths so I could get hard to get items faster. But would they let me go there? on my ticket, the booth number was in the eastern hall, and the corporate booths are on the western halls. Also a lot of blogs around said that people using these tickets to line up earlier was frowned upon.... well I don't know if that used to be true. but that's clearly not true anymore.

When you arrive at the TBS door with your ticket, they just take it away, so now you're inside, and you can walk anywhere. So I just followed up the directions to the corporate booth, and then I saw... that there's actually a fucking lot of people using those tickets to line up in advance for corporate booths, as there was already big line ups inside the big sight.

Shaft line, at about 8am, 2 hours before the oppening

This is the line I was in, at 9:30, 30 minute before opening.

This made me realize how many people there are, and how useless it is to just "come early". Comiket is crazy.
This is a picture of the top of the outside lines, seen from inside:

The ticket in the end was a great help, In 30 minutes I had already done 3 corporate booths, and that's probably before people who arrived at 7am (1 hour before me) outside, would even have entered the halls.

After the intensive shopping, I met my friend at the cosplay area. She was cosplaying Haruhi, and was cute doing it as always.

This picture is when I realize I got burned pretty badly by the sun on that day,

On day 2 I went with another friend, It was his first comiket, and he's a touhou fan so he came with me on the touhou day.
He said he enjoyed it, and I'm sure he enjoyed it.... as much as you can enjoy it.
Comiket is fun, but it's a really hard event so you kinda hate/love it at the same time.
I was also supposed to meet my other friend who was cosplaying again on day 2, but couldn't because of bad rain timing, and being stuck in a line to ship my stuff home for 2 damn hours (I got out of that line 20 minutes after the end of the event, which gave me the opportunity to take this picture)

Empty Comiket seems so weird O.o

For day two we got there kinda late (11am is the perfect time to arrive if you want to get inside without doing any line up, anytime before that you'll have to wait) and got stuck into that line up after shopping, so I didn't even have time to take cosplay pictures... but I got a picture of one of the 4 areas before it started to rain.

On a side note, there are 4 cosplay areas in Comiket, this is one of the less crowded ones. The 2 closes to the entrance are so crowded (especially the one in the garden) that it's almost impossible to move from one cosplayer to another when taking pictures.
You literally have to push your way through. It's annoying, and exhausting, both as a photograph getting pushed, and as someone trying to move through.

On day 3 I went alone, and had a little less shopping to do.
So I had time to enjoy it more, and check more cosplay and take more pictures.

Here's some of my favourite cosplay pictures of the week-end, you can see the links to the albums at the end of this post.

Matsumoto from Downtown

My friend as Haruhi

Black Hanekawa

Nagato Yuki, this is a Auto-Awesome gif created by google from a couple of pictures I took

Sadako from the Ring

Ui and Yui from K-On!

Jibril from No Game No Life

Persona

Bakemonogatari

Kill la Kill

Windows XP, thank you!

Tamako Market!

Not completly sure, maybe Conan?

2 sides of Hanekawa

Niku

CCHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

Day 1 cosplay pictures: (Google+/Picasa)
Day 3 cosplay pictures: (Google+/Picasa)
Day 1 Google+ Story Version
Day 3 Google+ Story Version

Finally here's a picture of all my C86 loot, including also the stuff I bought for a couple of friends oversea.

And that concludes my Comiket 86 report.
Hope you had fun reading it.