Baud Attitude

I’m not going to claim that I’m any sort of Maid café expert, but I’ve been to a couple in Tokyo and one in Osaka, and my opinion is that they’re generally nice places to go if you’re in the mood for some light pampering and heavy pandering and a generally relaxing atmosphere. The ones I’ve been to have all been in the hearts of otaku shopping districts, and a few hours shopping in any of those will put anyone in the mood for a comfy chair and some classical music and an overpriced omelet with a heart drawn on it.

So, when I heard that Beijing had a maid café of its own, I had to go and check it out. This was a bit of an adventure, because the directions I had were not entirely complete and I don’t really understand Chinese addresses and the building it had been in was completely gutted when I DID find it and then it took me a while to find it at its new location.

The lobby of the former location.  There was, at least, a map pointing me to the new restaurant.

Not that any of that is their fault, and walking that much DID get me really ready to eat something, so I was glad to finally find the place.

I got the sense something was wrong when I entered and was greeted with a half-hearted “okaeri nasai” rather than “okaeri nasai, goshuujinsama”.  I don’t need THAT much pandering but it was a little jarring.

Leaving that aside, it wasn’t a great experience.

To start with, their front room had 8 tables set up for anywhere between 2 and 6 people. One of these tables was occupied. That left seven empty tables and they still seated me at the bar so I’d have my back to the room. Any attempt to look at the decor or, to be honest, watch the staff at work meant twisting around and staring.

The first menu they handed me was bilingual in Chinese and Japanese. I tried ordering in Japanese, and I got a blank look and a trilingual picture menu (English/Japanese/Chinese) and it was made clear that ordering should be done through gesture.

Yaneura is a little atypical in that it’s actually an izakaya rather than just a café, so it has a pretty full menu. I still ordered the omelet rice, which should be the symbol, in any maid-themed establishment, that Mr. Customer is in the mood to have something goofy drawn on his food. Usually, this is a heart, but I’ve seen some more creative stuff from time to time.

Mine came with sauce, but no art.

I also got a coke, which was delivered in the form of a 330ml can of coke and an iceless glass, plunked down with all the coquettishness of a drive-by shooting by whoever had drawn the “serve the foreigner” short straw.

Again, this is Maid Café 101 stuff here. You open the can for the customer, you pour it in the glass. If you’re looking for advanced marks you get them a bendy straw and stick it on in there.

About the only thing they got right, really, was to have five servers on duty in maid outfits, and the outfits were suitably frilly. There were also some anime tchotchkes stuck on shelves around the main dining area, so I guess they worked on the décor and uniform parts and called it good.

Several really basic maid café traditions completely ignored or done halfway, Yaneura had one last insult after I’d finished my food and paid the bill.

I went looking for the bathroom, and there were signs pointing me downstairs, and this was where stuff started to go a little Douglas Adams because the bathroom was in a basement that looked to have been ripped apart for remodeling and left that way, with lots of building materials lying around and virtually no illumination. The men’s room had two stalls; one had a chef’s apron draped over the door from the inside and cigarette smoke wafting over the door, the other was an Asian-style floor toilet that had been prodigiously used and not flushed.

Being faced with a massive pile of the last guy’s business just put a fine cap on the experience.

I’m trying to envision a scenario where I could put a happier face on this place. I guess if you speak Chinese, or are with someone who does, and you came in with at least a group of four, and you’d never ever ever been to a maid-themed establishment before so you had really low expectations it might be OK.

Oh, and maybe they’ll finish the basement one of these days too.

I have waited 30 years for an excuse to rip off Gibson.  China provided that excuse.

When I went to the flea market at Panjiayuan, I had a rather pleasant conversation with one of the vendors, mostly about the weather which was quite frankly lovely at the time.  His response was that the air was going to be terrible later on, and I wrote this off with a hint of smugness – after all, I used to live in Los Angeles, and I’ve seen a lot of smog.

At any rate, my conversation with this vendor was in the morning and I more-or-less put it out of my mind until deciding to leave the hotel, a little after five PM, to look for dinner. There was a famous restaurant street that I wanted to go to, and it was only a few stops away on the metro.

It was still quite pleasant out, at least as far as temperature. I’d say low 70s.

It was also nearly pitch black out. Well, not really pitch black.  It was dark out, but there was light somewhere above – it just wasn’t reaching the ground.  Likewise, the neon signs on buildings were diffused, fuzzy around the edges.  The effect was very much like trying to see the world through static.

There were very few people on the streets, and most of then were wearing filter masks. I’d bought some in Shanghai as a precaution, so I congratulated myself on my foresight, put one on as well, and kept going.

I made it very nearly to the subway station before I realized that I was being an idiot and turned around to find food closer to the hotel.

It turned out that the lovely high temperatures and sunny morning had been the start of an inversion that had pumped Beijing’s AQI up from its typical levels in the 50-100 range to an off-the-charts 465, and also that the cheap filter masks I’d bought were just not rated to handle particulate on that scale. I had a sore throat for a couple of days afterwards.

For point of reference: The mainland China air quality scale tops out at “300+”, at which level it is recommended simply to not be outside if you can help it, as it can cause breathing difficulties even in normally healthy adults. There aren’t levels above that, but I’m going to classify this one as “The air is actively trying to kill you, please avoid breathing”

In addition to my crash course in air quality standards, I learned a valuable lesson about trusting the locals when they talk about weather.  So it was really a very educational day.

I didn’t have many things in mind to buy when I went to China. I wanted to get the Xiaomi Mi4 so that I could put Windows Phone 10 on it when it became available, and that wasn’t too hard to come by. I may put something up on here about that later, but there’s not too much to talk about yet.

The other thing I wanted was a poster from the 1960s that I fell in love with during a Chinese Art History course I took back in sophomore year.

It’s both a really pretty poster and surprisingly dark, because the message is “look at all this food I am harvesting, all this tasty food!”, and the country was actually in the middle of a famine of epic proportions, mostly because of that wacky Mao guy and his dislike of birds.

That is simplifying things a bit, I realize.

Anyway, they printed over a million of them, presumably because people would take pictures of delicious food even if they couldn’t have the real thing, so I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to find a vintage poster or modern reprint. It turns out that most propaganda posters got destroyed in the 1970s, either because they were no longer PC or for paper recycling drives, so it turned into quite a frustrating quest.

Eventually my search took me to the Panjiayuan “dirt market” in Beijing. This is part flea market, part crafts fair, part actual shops. The actual, established shops surround the part-time vendors, who all get to lay out their wares for sale in temporary stalls or on blankets.

As a guy who used to be a craft fair vendor in my teens, I have a lot of sympathy for the poor schmucks in the cheap seats. They’re the ones trying to sell cheap jade, amber and malachite carvings, fake antique coins and assorted other cheesy junk, and they’re the ones who are going to be bundling up 95% of their wares at the end of the night and trying again the next day.

The established shops have the Serious Jade and Ivory carvings (with, to give them credit, very large signs pointing out that what they’re selling is mammoth ivory), paintings, antique furniture, and – finally – a huge number of shops selling vintage posters.

I even found the poster I’d come looking for, only to find that the vendor wanted CNY4000, or about $640, and was not in the mood to talk price. So… That one is going to stay on my Things I Will Not Own list.

I went back to browsing the vendor stalls, vaguely looking for a magatama in some sort of stone. Did not find any, despite there being carved stone of virtually every other shape and size – even one lovingly crafted jade “marital aid” that goes down next to J-List’s moon wands as being an unexpected material for that sort of thing –  vaguely considered getting a random hunk of malachite to commemorate my days playing an EQ mage, and eventually left empty-handed.

Still, a fascinating place to browse knick-knacks.  Also, if you have much deeper pockets than me and a taste for vintage posters, this was the only place I was able to find them.