A Review of Cat Cafe Nanny and Neko Jelala, both near Akihabara

Today was a momentous day. Not only did I recover my Uniqlo shopping, which I'd left on a bus on Monday, from the Lost and Found Office, but I also visited two new cat cafes, bringing my grand total up to five!

These two places are just a few minutes walk apart in distance, but worlds apart in experience. Read on for copious pictures of cats.

Neko Jelala Cat Cafe

I admit I didn't take as many photos here as in the other one, but that was mostly because this place was pretty bleh. There were some lovely cats with their own personalities, but the place was just the one room and while the cats were all in excellent condition they didn't have as much room to roam about as I've seen in the other places I've been.

This guy is (I think) an Abyssinian, so had a kind of ruff around his/her neck.

She was asleep in the car bed when I arrived but I spotted her waking up and then my camera strap did the rest.

Beautiful green eyes! Then there were the sofa residents. The one on the left is a curl eared cat and there was a note saying he was the friendliest and most easy going of cats.

I swear he didn't move a muscle the whole time I was there although I did hear him purring when I stroked him for a few minutes. Japanese cats don't seem to purr as much as English ones. The one on the right was long haired and loved having his/her fur stroked all along her body. When she looked up to see why I'd stopped I found she also had lovely green eyes.

There were a number of other residents...this first one got up and walked across the room and I swear she/he was the same size as your average dog. Huge!

...but it just didn't compare to my preferred Nyafe Melange in Ebisu.

Cat Cafe Nanny

Now you're talking - this place was awesome.

One of my two criticisms is that it was on the 4th floor (3rd floor in english lingo) and there was no lift. Not exactly a killer but, you know. As soon as I walked in this little guy woke up and started waving his paws at me.

When I lent in to stroke him he started licking my fingers then wanted to play. He was one of three clearly quite young cats who were very sweet and playful, but then so were the older residents. I had an explore before settling down to play and this was one of the two upstairs rooms.

There were only two cats on this whole floor and the first was adorable, and very happy to be stroked.

Then the second meandered towards me. It was a tiny lion!

I know she's just had a summer haircut...but...it's a tiny lion! Again my camera strap proved irresistible.

Do you not just want to hug her and stroke her and call her Bert? Awesome.

Back downstairs, the young trio, two of which were definitely from the same litter, were at play.

They didn't stay still often, and I never managed to get all three of them in shot.

One of them decided something was hiding under my maxi skirt.

They were adorable and so playful! They reminded me of Nickerjac's little boy who is also highly energetic! Again, the camera strap was the attraction and one of the older cats, who was very beautiful but not keen on being stroked, joined in.

There were other residents:

Crazy sideburns:

Check out these eyebrows:

The little cats were clearly fully accepted by the older ones and loved cuddling up to them. These two were particularly snug.

As were these two:

The grey cat being used as a pillow was beautiful. She loved having her chest stroked and used her paws to hold my hand there.

She was so blissed out she was hanging half off the table. Hard to believe she was really comfortable! I spent most of my time sitting at the table she was laying on and stroking her and the little one.

The things that made this cafe my absolute favourite was the space, the daylight, the sleeping options for the cats and the attitude of the cats to me. Sometimes you get the feeling you are bothering the cats and that's a definite no-no. Here they were actually pleased to see me and wanted to interact, and when they'd had enough there were plenty of places for them to go off to.

I said at the start that I had two complaints and only gave one - my second is that they told me at the start when my 'hour' started but you know I never remember that kind of thing so I accidentally overstayed by 5 minutes but got charged for an extra 30 mins because that's the way the charging goes. My bad, but at Shirokane and Ebisu they give you your start time in your lanyard so no-memories like me can work out when they need to go.

Will I be coming back to Akihabara for cat action? Yes! But only to the second place. Cat Cafe Nanny is about 40 mins door to door whereas Nyafe Melange is about 15 mins walk to that still wins for convenience and, of course, for Bruiser...

...but when I fancy more of an excursion I'll be coming back here again.

Blythe Dolls in Tokyo

Have you heard of these dolls? They tend to be a bit like marmite - for non-british readers that means you either love or hate them. Here are just a few photos of Flickr of some. Lots more here.

Meanwhile on Etsy you can imagine all the accessories and actual dolls you can buy. I just saw a doll on there for £850. People take these things really seriously.

Personally I am not bothered by them. I can admire the artistry without wanting to get involved. That doesn't mean I wasn't intrigued though when I saw giant ones in a shop window in central Tokyo.

They were there to advertise Bottega Veneta handbags so the only items of relevance to the advertising part of this were the bags the dolls are holding.

As a spectacle though, you'd have to agree it is very eye catching.

There were a lot of excited, young, japanese women taking photos.

The shop was the Isetan in Shinjuku (the equivalent of London's Selfridges), the same one I mentioned in my last window display post. Meanwhile, in the slightly more downmarket Uniqlo, there were these:

These furry guys were in the middle of the shop with their own tie-in t-shirt display for a new film which was being trailed on the monitors.

Naturally I have no idea what the film is but if these guys are anything to go by it is possibly my kind of thing!

Indigo Dyeing in Asakusa

I had long wanted to try this so when I saw it as an activity on Meet-up.com I was all in. I met a group of 16 others in Asakusa and the organiser took us along many back streets until we arrived at Wanariya - which I have since found has a really good english website. It was a bit like the 'paint your own pottery' places I've been to in London where you choose an item, decorate it and then they bake it for you. Here we could choose from t-shirts, bags or simple cloths and there were lots of examples around to inspire you.

I chose a rectangular cloth. We had a little lecture in english and japanese to start all about the history of indigo and its manufacture and then we were off. The teacher was suitably dressed with encouragingly blue tinted hands.

I was quite disappointed that we could only try the tie-dye technique since that was a bit 1988 for me but, as they say over here, "comme ci, comme ca".

My cloth ended up looking like an unpainted lab model of an STD.

In retrospect this wasn't a great idea as I was just going to end up with big white splodges, but I was mainly in it for the dye so didn't think about it at the time. We were kitted out with plastic shoe protectors, smocks, clear plastic gloves and then blue elbow length gloves over those.

Basically - that dye wasn't going anywhere near your person unless you went in head first. The vats were capable of taking a whole person since they were these metal oil drums. So much liquid!

You only need 60 seconds in one to get the full colour so the deed was done and then you get it out, squeeze out the excess and wait for the blue to arrive.

You can see in the photo above that mine, at the top, was already dark blue while the green one at the bottom was only just out of the vat so not yet developed. It was pretty cool to watch it change. More rinsing and a quick spin...

...and it was time to try and get those elastic bands off.

And this is how they all turned out.

Pretty cool huh? See me - just to the right of centre holding my white blobby cloth? Ah well, lesson learnt.

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed the looms in the background of the teacher photo.

Turns out this place does traditional weaving too and so while I was there I booked in for a weaving lesson. Only the most basic one - making two coasters - but I've always wanted to try so am very excited!

Big Top

This is the biggest quilt top I have ever made. It measures 70"x100" which is roughly 1.7m x 2.5m.

I have no idea what to do with it. It seems silly to quilt it while I am here as then I'll need to transport the bulkier finished version of it back home again. So I have decided to leave it like this and decide what to do with it whenever I arrive back in the UK.

Patchwork Distractions

There are various ups and downs here at present so to distract myself I have been going gung ho on this big'un.

 

That is a double mattress on its side that it is draped over, so you can tell that it is quite wide. And it was when I draped it there that I realised I had perhaps overestimated the number of blocks required.

I have always liked zig zag quilts but loath patchwork with triangles so loved this idea of working on the diagonal when I came across it on Pinterest. I was trying to think when I cut out the pieces, since this is a project I brought with me from the UK, at which time only about half the colour/white squares were sewn and trimmed to size. It turns out it was a year ago exactly give or take a couple of weeks. I linked to the tutorial in that post.

 

I can still remember making the colour piles out of all my fat quarters and looking at them against the green carpet. It would be clean only for a minute or two after I'd finished hoovering and then all the bits of thread would start accumulating again. I've been thinking about that flat a lot recently. I really liked it and felt very at home there. I recently downloaded a 'Home Sweet Home' pattern to make for a friend. It all makes you think.

A History of Pooch, the World Cup and Me

Pooch is a football fanatic. By day he supports Manchester United, but on special occasions he supports England. Pooch and I met in 2004 and by our first World Cup as a couple (2006) we were living together in relative harmony. I was blogging back then and graphed the amount of time the two of us spent together each day when not sleeping during that period.

In 2010 we were in Istanbul on holiday for much of it, and I had got used to Pooch's obsession, helped by the beauty of the city.

In 2014, after a divorce and getting remarried, we are in Tokyo so have missed any UK build up there might have been although I understand that had been quite low key. However, Pooch's passion is not diminished and his preparations have been single minded. This saw both of us in a seedy sports bar in Roppongi - an area of Tokyo kind of like Soho in the 80s - at 7am the day of the first England game. The key difference to previous occasions we had watched a match together was that in this bar a lot of people had clearly been there all night and a lot were clearly asleep.

They woke up when England appeared to score in the first five minutes and Pooch let out a roar like an attacking Wampa (Star Wars reference). Sadly England lost the game, and the following one, and are now out of the World Cup.

The point, however, is that at some point during these tournaments Pooch feels mildly guilty about the amount of time he is spending on football and the subsequent neglect of his wife and tries to make amends by offering to do something he wouldn't normally. This time it was going to a Cat Cafe. Pooch always says he is allergic to cats so I had expected him to sit in a corner and look grumpy, but to be fair he sat down next to a cat and was straight in there.

Then he saw Bruiser. I had of course told him about him (Pooch about Bruiser, not vice versa) and those of you with good memories will remember that Bruiser hates everyone and everything. Here he is on a previous visit.

Pooch immediately felt a connection to an animal his true equal in grumpiness.

Naturally Bruiser resented the affection and took a swipe at him. This did not deter Pooch who spent the rest of our time there talking to and occasionally risking a stroke of Bruiser's crazily thick fur. When we left he then proposed an amendment to our agreement to get a cat once we own our own home (an agreement that has been tortuously arrived at over 10 years) - that when we do get a cat it should be a grumpy one like Bruiser. To round off the outing we then went to a Japanese ice cream shop I've eyed up on previous visits to Ebisu. Partly because you can get ice cream that looks like a bear.

Neither of us went for the bear in the end but we did get some amazing flavours like melon, water melon, brown sugar, tomato, macha and milk. The texture was less creamy than english ice cream and slightly more like a granita, but still extremely delicious. The day was hot and humid so the melon in particular was very refreshing!

To finish, some of you may have noticed the new blog design.

My previous effort failed magnificently when the header I'd created was too short which left me with that odd pale plue design for ages. I much prefer this one. Let me know what you think!

Edit: Pooch complained at my using pictures of him on my blog despite having been fine with this on many other occasions. I've therefore removed his face from the photos.