Ice Cream Museum.
So by this stage, you’ve probably worked out that Tokyo locals are seriously wacky. so it’s probably with scarcely a ruffle of your much-practiced ennui that you receive the knowledge that Tokyo contains an ice cream “museum.” OK, so it is in fact a shop, part of the completely-indecipherable (for illiterate gaijin, anyway) indoor “themepark” called Namjatown in Ikebukuro’s Sunshine City complex. The shop, actually called the “Cup Ice Museum” is itself part of a large ice cream themed area called, if my memory serves me correctly, Ice Cream World. The museum is a collection of ice cream flavours available from ice creameries around Japan. There seems to be in the order of about 300 different kinds of ice cream, available in tubs in the museum. Many of the flavours are ordinary and sedate, your run-of-the-mill chocolate, vanilla, crab, beef, salad, you know. And then things start getting well, a bit strange. Fancy miso ramen (noodles) flavoured ice cream? Actually, it’s not as emetic as it sounds. How about salt flavour? Okhotsk salt, no less. Frankly, this one was pretty weird, with its combination of salty and sugary. How about seaweed flavour? Actually, I couldn’t taste the seaweed, but there was a pronounced salty under-taste, so I suppose that was it. Sunflower flavour? What precisely IS sunflower flavour? Admittedly, we passed up garlic flavour and eggplant flavour, which is possibly just as well. Drawbacks: you have to pay an admission fee (on 12.03.06, adults ¥300) to get into Namjatown, that’s before you can even see the ice cream. Nothing much is explained in English (good luck to you if you can’t read the Japanese on the ice cream tubs.) But for sheer Tokyo-weird factor, it gets a pretty high rating…
call me old fashioned, but miso or crab flavoured icecream really doesnt float my boat