In the past week or so I had the good fortune to meet up with some very lovely people, whom I admire very much for their respective blogs.

Friday saw me meeting up with Hana from Finding Tokyo, who I met previously in January, and Miss Mitsu from Universal Doll. Hana just has this lovely positive sunny energy about her, and Mitsu is an absolute cack with dry, sometimes sarcy wit, so it was a real pleasure to hang out with them. First we shopped, in Alta and Lumine Est, and then we ate.

I wanted to take some proper shots with them, but was a bit shy to ask…and so we ended up with some fun ones instead!

We found this all-you-can-eat-for-3-thousand-yen-yakiniku place in Shinjuku, and it was 4 or so floors up with a most interesting display at the front of it. It was a set of lifesize figures, an old man displaying something on his bike, while a woman with a baby and 3 kids looked on. I had to jump in and see what the old guy was showing them:

Meanwhile Hana and Mitsu got behind the children, and you see their cheeky smiles as well as the startling faces on the kids.

Yes, the girl seemed to have something eerily wrong with her barely open eyes (possibly narcolepsy? or was she having a ‘squint off’ with an imaginary friend?), while the boy had something streaming from his – whether tears or pus, I couldn’t be sure. Creepy! 

And the other child in the red hat, whilst having a pleasant and jolly expression on his face, had snot streaming from one nostril – GROSS!

It was like a Tokyo Village of the Damned, I tells ya.

Not great picture quality, alas, but hopefully the novelty factor redeems them somewhat!

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Anyway, onto the food. Turn away now, vegetarians, for you will not like what you see.

Yes, all manner of meat lay in wait to be grilled, sizzled and delectably charred – and I insisted we put the few vegetables offered, onto the BBQ as well. There MAY have been a few off-colour comments about sausages. Like I said, Mitsu is a comedian, and we all ended up using dirty double entendres, as you do when girls get together 🙂

To round it all off, what do you think we did? Got some purikura!

Much girly fun.

Then on Monday I met up with Samuel and Rebecca of Tokyo Telephone – and ate and got purikura!!  S & R are a lovely couple who are extremely stylish – as you’d expect. But I was most impressed with their thoughtfulness, as we discussed the suitability or otherwise of some types of posts while the Japan disaster was going on. They chose deliberately to keep their trip low-key, not shouting to the  mountaintops that they love Japan and are doing all they can to save it, or rushing to the Times with Japan fashion scoops.  (Be sure, they DO love Japan). 

After a little wandering in Harajuku, we hit a purikura place (does one EVER get sick of puri?), and here are the results:

It was with real regret that we went our separate ways after, but we’ll be meeting up in London in June for more shenanigans.

I love that through social media like twitter you can form relationships with people that then get fleshed out in the real world. Of course I’ll continue reading all their blogs, for I love them, but knowing the writers as people just enhances the experience manifold.

My outfit, for anyone interested: blue vinyl jacket from Love Boat in Osaka, Glad News dress with beaded skull on front, Chrome Rats from Sass & Bide (the leggings), big plastic cross from Cameron Racy, and boots from Yosuke USA at Marui One, Shinjuku.

Note: if you click on any picture you can see it larger.