Nakano report, Canadian Embassy.

I had some Extra time after going to renew my passport today and went to Nakano, Spoke to a cute nekomimi maid for an hour, in Japanese, not sure how I accomplished that, and then raided Nakano Broadway.

Interestingly, there's a new Mandarake shop.
It's not really interesting though, but the entrance looks super cool.

It's kind of like the 4th floor old toy museum, this one is kind of a museum for old plastic model kit.

I found a goldmine of nice ToAru stuff in one of the Mandarake, and that super cute Asuka's figure.
I haven't bought an Evangelion figure in a long time, but that one was too cute. And cheap...
Now I'll have to hunt down the Rei that goes with it.

And I'm adding 1 more Misaka Imouto to my strap/keychain collection.

I posted the collection yesterday on G+ but I'll post it here as well.

While I'm actually writing something on my blog, I guess I could talk about the Canadian embassy in Japan, since I had to go there today to renew my passport.
It's the second embassy I go to in my life, the first one being the Japanese embassy in Montreal.
The Canadian one in Tokyo is super huge compared to that little room in the middle of a big complex building in Montreal.
The Canadian Embassy is called Place Canada, and is a super huge building. I didn't visit any of it though, just went straight to the consulate place. Where I was told, I can only submit passport renewals in the mornings...
That's super stupid, fortunately, the girl let me submit it anyway, so all was fine in the end.
Passport renewal is super easy, hand the papers, pay, and wait 2 weeks (or so), no real hassle so that was fine.

Tachikawa X Anime

Little history about Tachikawa before I begin this post. Tachikawa is about 45m~1h from Tokyo, west of Nakano. The IKEA is there, and more importantly, some anime stuff Happen there. Some scene in the ToAru series happen there (actually I'm curious to see if the sister's arc happens there both in Index and Railgun or if they changed the location to look like Tachikawa only in Railgun...), more recently, Gatchaman Crowds and Sekai Seifuku: Bouryaku no Zvezda happen there.

Today (and yesterday) in Tachikawa, a matsuri was held. It's a pretty normal matsuri, actually not so interesting compared top other Japanese matsuri I've been, maybe it was because of the temperature, I don't know...

It's a matsuri so I had to buy Yakisoba!

 

Anyway, in parallel to this matsuri, a anime rally was organized, where you have to walk all around town to get cards from participating shops, if you get 7 or more, you get a special 2015 Railgun Calendar.

This was the starting point:

So I did it, and I also collected some of the special goods sold there along the way. It was a long walk, took me about 3 hours (you need only 7 cards, but I went and got all 10 of them, and 2 shops also gave me last year's card so I got 12 in the end), unfortunately, once you go a little farther away from the station, Tachikawa isn't really interesting. So it wasn't really that nice.
And the calendar they give as prize is ... meh
I don't regret doing it, spoke with some people, especially the people at the Tea house (one of the participating shops) were really nice.
Here's some pictures of some of the shops:

The tea house

Tachikawa also has some really nice Index Vending Machines all around town, I found 4 of them, but unfortunately, not the Imouto one :( (I wasn't specifically looking for them so I didn't check their location on the internet, but it's available on Tachikawa's website)
The 4 I saw, and the special drink they offer:

And this is today's total loot:

This was the website for the event: http://www.tbt.gr.jp/tachikawa_anime/rakuichi2014autumn/
if you want to see the picture album from today it's here, but most pictures are already posted in this post.

Anime Street in Asagaya, Nakano shoping and Maid Cafe!

So a new "Anime Street" apparently opened recently (I don't know when exactly) in Asagaya (2 station from Nakano).
I went to visit it today, it was .... soso, but then again, it was Tuesday, and apparently a bunch of shop are closed on Tuesday.... one of the shop dealers told use it's really nice during the week-end because there's event and stuff.

The street itself is really small and a little far from the station, nut it was really easy to find due to indications

While it was a small street, there was still some interesting things there.
A couple of Cafe

We didn't eat in any of them, but the cafe with the Sphere theme had some range Murata stuff, so I went in to buy it.

Close to it was a mini museum of the Atelier Series, it looked really nice, and I bough an art book there.

And while it was closed there seem to be a nice shot of Mad House studio

There was also a (closed) cosplay shop

Since the street was pretty small, we got there kinda fast, so we moved to Nakano after that. Did a lot of shopping, then went to kuroneko cafe close to nakano broadway.
Kuroneko Cafe (I think their website is one of the less inviting website I've ever seen) is a Maid Cafe with Nekomimi wearing maids! It's the first time I went there, though I've seen it often (they also have cafe inside nakano broadway itself). I really liked it, maybe because our maid, Saori, was so cute and nice. The formula was quite different from the other cafe I've been to, the price was 1000 yen per 30 minute, with free drinks.
Since I don't drink alcohol, it's quite expensive, but it also means the Maid is there to speak to you as much as possible, so that you drink less, exactly the opposite of other maid cafe where they want you to drink more.
I'm definitely gonna go back to this Maid cafe.... and I hope I can see Saori again!

We finished our day by stopping in Shinjuku for a quick trip to Anime, when I spend more money again.
Here's my loot of the day!

Theme song of the movie

Dengeki Daioh, bough to see what the special gift was

special gift...

is a kind of plastic sheet.... I'll use it as a poster

Atelia Escha&Logy Art Book

Old Range Murata stuff (book is from 2004)

from a lottery, second worst prize, is still pretty neat, this is an illustration book

2 mini-Ika-chan

You can see all the pictures from today here: (Google+ / Picasa)