Parfaits and Karaoke

 Early in the day we set off to find a parfait shop.  I was absolutely flabbergasted by the wall of parfaits that greeted us when we entered the shop.  We had some yummy parfaits.  I had cookies and cream cheese parfait--it was delicious.

 This is just a sample of the menu.  If you look towards the bottom, you see some of the more "unique" choices of parfaits.  Fried chicken parfait just sounds oh-so-yummy.  (Eeek!)

 I know they probably have these somewhere here in the states, but I have never seen it before, so I am including it in this post.  The clear button is to summon your waiter/waitress when you are ready.  Quite handy.  In Japan, you don't tip at restaurants, which was a hard thing for me not to do.  I always felt guilty leaving without tipping.  Emily told me they will chase you down and return your money to you if you try to tip.
 

We spent some time in the arcade playing games.  We played air hockey twice, and I won both times.  Unfortunately, each time I took a picture, one of our scores didn't show up, so you can't tell that I beat her (other than the look on her face).  She got a huge kick out of the fact that it happened.  In the background is a purikura booth.

We spent quite a bit of money trying to get one of the Sailor Moon dolls out of the claw.  There were a couple kids hovering around us, waiting for us to leave so they could get reap on what we started.  We never did get the doll, and I am sure they swooped right in and got it when we left.

Emily really wanted to show me Japanese karaoke, which is so different than American karaoke.  We arrived half an hour before free time, where you can sing as long as you want for a flat rate.  Normally you pay by the hour (or half hour).  Since they were pretty slow, the guy was nice to us and let us have the free time rate early.  We were there for four hours!  We would have stayed longer, but the tablet which we picked our songs from died for the third time and we decided to call it quits at that point.

We were given a room to ourselves.  Part of the deal we got is that we had to order one food item each.  I got the chocolate covered sticks, and Emily chose fries.  We munched those down pretty quickly and decided to try something a little more adventurous.  There is a phone on the wall in which we ordered our next item--takoyaki--which is fried octopus in a fried batter ball.  It was actually very yummy.

We were also given free run of the soda machine.  They had some fun flavors, so I tried a bunch of different types.  After singing for so long, a liquid is definitely needed!

We sang everything from Disney, Les Miserables, Roxette, Nickleback, Bon Jovi, to even some Japanese (that would be Emily), and everything in between.  It was a blast.  The speakers are set really loud in the tiny room, so my first thought was oh no, but they had a fun reverb to them which helped disguise the fact that I was completely off-key.  I can totally see why Emily and her friends spent so much time at karaoke.