“Two of them are coming at 2:00 and then the television people will be here, and then the additional two at 3:00” Dorothee, the priestess of the temple we were staying at for the next few weeks said casually over our mid-morning tea break.

We had discovered half of us had been to Tokyo before in our group of eight, and half of us hadn’t, but out of the half that had been to Tokyo, only two had been to a maid cafe, and so, on our group’s first day of Tokyo, I had scheduled a culture shock tour of Akihabara.

We arrived at @home cafe, nestled right across from the Tenga pop up shop on the fifth floor of DonQuixote (a store in itself that deserves overtures about their stock) and quickly our group of eight Americans sat down.

“Is this like a sex thing?” S across from me asked in a hushed tone, afraid the maids could hear her.

“Kind of.” Not really, it was hard to explain “It’s just for otaku to come and have a female friend for awhile.”

Shuu came and gave us our cards that would end up being a joke for days, level one masters and princesses. She did the moe moe kyuun and blessed all our drinks with kawaii and took photos with us as a group of all australians shuffled behind us and began to get the same service.

“Everything is too sweet,” A complained, stabbing at his Love Love Parfait “How can you eat all this stuff.”

“No one comes for the food.” I said as the maids began karaoke in the other room.

I finished my parfait, my latte, and half of S’s parfait, maybe someone did.