6th day - Ikebukuro part 1 ~ Hello Kitty and the Petshop

Hey guys,

on the 6th day Amy, Zoe and I went to Ikebukuro for the first time to get ourselves some Inkan 印鑑 (Japanese stamps used instead of signatures). We had heard that a department store called Tokyu Hands in Ikebukuro did them for cheap and that they could also be collected on the same day (some take days until they are ready for collection). These stamps are also known as Hanko 判子 and Insho 印章.

On the way to Tokyu Hands we spied a Sanrio store - the company that owns Hello Kitty and some various other cute characters - so we headed in.

Hello Kitty popcorn machine

Inside there were so many different cute products with various characters on them varying from phone cases to home-ware. There was even a Hello Kitty popcorn machine - pictured above - which made popcorn in three different flavours:

薄塩 usushio - lightly salted
キャラメル kyarameru - caramel
バター　bataa - butter

If you know me then you know I absolutely adore popcorn so I was very tempted to buy some (I was especially pleased that they have both salt and butter flavour). However it was 200 yen (£1.26) - not expensive by any means - but not cheap enough for me to fold in to temptation. No doubt if I see it again I will give it a go.

After the Sanrio store we went straight to Tokyu Hands and paid for our stamps, the woman working there said it would take 30 mins per inkan so we could come back in an hour and a half.
Luckily one of my last names fitted on the stamp (there was a maximum of 4 characters) however both Amy and Zoe used their first names as their surnames were too long.

Tokyu Hands had a pet store on one of the upper floors so we headed there straight after.

They had this machine where you could make keychains of your pets for  500 yen using your own pictures from an SD card or from other storage devices. As it was a pet store it was obviously made for pictures of your cute furry or feathery friends but there were pictures of babies on the machine so you could use it with any picture.

They had a little area where you could go and see some cats playing around but you had to pay to get in and it wasn't particularly cheap so we didn't go in.

A rather unimpressed kitty

They had this really pretty cat with a rather festive (if not too soon) halloween hat on that was loose in the shop. It tried to go for a walk around the store but was promptly scooped up and placed on the counter and then delivered into its cat basket. All this manhandling made the cat rather miffed and you can see the kitty giving the shop assistant the death glare in the photo above (poor cat!).

The store had lots of pet products and even pets that you could buy from rabbits to insects and fish!

After the pet store we headed off to sunshine city to spend some time before our stamps would be ready. Sunshine is an entertainment complex including restaurants, ice-cream shops, shopping areas, an aquarium and many other attractions.

Kimonos we saw in sunshine city

We were going to go to Namja town a small theme park which had an ice-cream area, gyoza area and funfair type attractions, however the entrance fee was rather high and we weren't sure what it actually covered so we decided to save it for another day.

Instead we decided to go to the observatory which I will cover in the next part of this post!

see you later!