My friend, Tania snagged us (herself, her mom, Christine, and me) tickets to the highly anticipated pop-up Museum of Ice Cream, which had its weekend tickets sold out within a few minutes. My latest food obsession since moving to Japan has hands down been ice cream. Going to my office’s 7/11 during my lunch break became a daily ritual, and always helped me push hrough the rest of the day. Particularly… The Jumbo Paripariジャンボ パリパリand milk vanilla ミルクバニラin a waffle cone .
Anyway, after I moved back last year July, several things have changed in me, but my love for ice cream certainly hasn’t. LA’s ice cream game has certainly gone strong. And a few weekends ago, Tania told me about the Museum of Ice Cream and how she was going to prawl on her computer, iphone, and iPad with her mom to grab us tickets.
Last weekend, I proudly walked to, ate and play through my way through the Museum of Ice Cream in my Smitten Ice Cream tshirt and red skirt from Rope Picnic, a women’s clothing shop in Tokyo.
My #1 favorite exhibit was the “banana split” exhibit… which consisted of about ten thousand bananas, two swings, and scratch/sniff walls. Here, I totally became my 10 year old self-playing and happily shuffled through my dream banana forest. If I had more time, I’d definitely play hide n seek in and pull pranks on people (like how I used to hide in circular clothes racks and freak the hell out of my mom when shopping with her)
My second favorite exhibit was the “sprinkles swimming pool.” Literally, it was a swimming pool that consisted of steps, a ladder, and diving board, pool toys (loved the donut), and almost 100 million sprinkles. We had so much fun jumping in them and playing catch with giant inflatable balls. Even after we left, all of us found sprinkles in our socks by the time we got home.
The most unique “ice cream” was black charcoal ice cream. The woman dispensing them told me it was the “hot new ice cream flavor of 2017.” I’m not sure how I feel about this trend, if it’s the same of how this one tasted, because although it looks unique, it was dry, had little flavor, not even cold, and made my teeth embarrassingly black/gross .. yeah, not nothing I’d bring a date to or consume before a business meeting/photoshoot. Black sesame ice cream would’ve been much better.
The Museum of Ice Cream was certainly a fun Willy-Wonka/Candyland/Instagram worthy playground that cheered me up after my crappy week (got kind of sick, had a bad deadline at work, and other crappy problems), but many of us believe the museum was overhyped and overpriced. There wasn’t enough samples nor exhibits to make up for the cost; the samples consisted of a small piece of Dove Chocolate, a small scoop of McConnell’s banana and salted caramel ice cream, mint chocolate mochi ice cream, a tiny handful of gummy bears, charcoal ice cream, and a strange blueberry pancake that came out pink to mess with our minds. We certainly finished within an hour and Tania’s mom, as confused as I, was wondering, “That’s…it?” Anyway, if you’re going, make sure you bring some kids and/or anyone who wants to relive their childhood dreams of making impossible things possible.
