japanese influences

I thought that my last post would be it for a while, but then yesterday I came across a couple of things that I determined to be blog-worthy. And both of them are of Japanese origin too, which makes for a nice, neat post.

Kitty Bricks

I woke up earlier than usual yesterday morning, and ended up being ready to leave for the ICS Kindergarten a whole 30 minutes early (which is pretty much unheard of for me)! I decided to use this extra time to get breakfast out. And where, you might ask, did I choose to go? McDonalds, of course! Here's the thing: I love McDonalds breakfasts, especially their egg mcmuffin meals!

So I was sitting there, enjoying my hash brown and fanta (it's larger than the miniscule orange juice, and must contain some vitamin C, right?) when on my table, I noticed this large promotional sticker. It just left me wondering how these little figurines resemble bricks?

And then I noticed a nice little message from Kitty herself on the cup that I was drinking out of.

And in the bottom corner of the large table-sticker, I noticed some promotional material for the "Secret House" thing that Sal mentioned in one of her recent posts. It seems like Secret House stuff is popping up everywhere... on the MTR, McDonalds, huge streetside billboards, etc. Whatever it is, the admission is $60 for adults, which seems ridiculous to me for anything related to Hello Kitty. But then I guess there is a whole theme park in Japan devoted to Kitty and her other Sanrio friends.

Sticky Pictures

Athania and Chris are leaving HK in less than a week, heading to Hawaii, and then LA (you guys will be missed!). And seeing as Athania is the undisputed queen of sticky pictures (and even coined the term herself, I believe), the two of us decided to get some taken yesterday. I've never considered myself a fan of sticky pictures, and hadn't taken any in about 4 years, but I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Here's a photographic run-down of what happened.

It took us a while to find a sticky-picture booth. And I should mention that the sticky-picture booth is a social creature -- a lone booth is virtually unheard of. They are always found in large herds... or packs (I sense another collective-noun crisis coming on!). We wandered around Mongkok for a while, and then found a little mall of the caliber that are known to have large groups of sticky-picture machines. And fortunately (but not surprisingly), Athania actually knew the Cantonese for "sticky picture," so was able to locate the large area devoted to the things. Here is the sticky picture queen herself at the entrance of the sticky picture village.

It seems that the majority of machines have Japanese instructions only, and since neither Athania nor I can read any Hiragana or Katakana, we were forced to take wild guesses when given options on the booth's computer screen. This resulted in some interesting pictures, as you will see later. Here both of us are considering how best to decorate the photos that we took.

Here's a sample of one of the photo packages you could get at the booth. I like the crowns. I wish we could have figured out how to have crowns...

As I said, our lack of Japanese ability led to some interesting sticky pictures. We took quite a few photos in our first booth, and then somehow got stuck with the really bad, but funny shots (i.e. the one in which I have no head).

After we took these shots and divided them between the two of us, we decided to get more at a new booth! It was so much fun! I definitely sense a new obsession coming on...