Pelicula

Hello there,

yesterday I've done something quite Japanese. And promised to blog about it ;)

Met friends of mine at Shibuya station. And they told me they would take me to pelicula because they thought after my last blog entry that might be a funny thing to do, completely Japanese. Got me curious. Especially since pelicula means movie in Spanish. So, after some strolling around we went into an establishment, how to say, unlike things we have in Austria. Very colourful and filled with strange music, or actually more a cacophony of many different machines. In the entrance area all of those were these thingies where you can control this kind of robotic arm that after putting it into some position it will drop down and grab with its three fingers. And if you're lucky it will grab some item for you. Looks like this:


But back to the actual purpose of my visit there: movie-pelicula. Those are machines mainly for schoolgirls. But as a foreigner nobody stops you from using them. You go inside a bright white box to make pictures of you. All the while having to make decisions on a big touchscreens for all kind of backgrounds with crazy environments. No idea what the difference between the different machines is, but they had around 20 of them. And at all of them there were people (girls) queueing. My friends selected one and the three of us got in after some waiting. Our Japanese teammember did the selecting, and we made a lot of funny faces for the camera.
I thought that was it, but you move on into the box next of the first, to edit the pictures. They have algorithms in place who will make your eyes ridiculously large, you know, enlarge your pupils like you were an anime character. But you can add all kind of stuff to the pictures, like stars, hearts, kana writings...

In the end you can load it to your mobile phone - if it's a Japanese one and have this kind of bluetooth they have here - and print the pics on photo paper. Here's what i got: one third of that photo paper.


Hehe, now i have a truly Japanese bookmark.

Oh, one more random Shibuya shot, with a bit more people crossing then on the last pic i posted. Still not many, though.