Open House

The Open House bookstore is Bangkok’s newest buzzy retail concept. Atop the city’s most high-end retail space, the Central Embassy mall, it is a fittingly chic combination of bookstore, lounge and food court designed by the same architects who fitted Tokyo’s exquisite T-Site bookstore. At Open House, the concept is an interesting one. Beautiful art books (and an exhibition space) pull in the punters and the various food outlets scattered among the shelves ring the tills. It is beautifully executed, with comfy sofas and floor-to-ceiling windows giving dramatic views over the Ploenchit skyscrapers, almost like a tropical Fifth Avenue. The whole thing really speaks to Bangkok’s new confidence as a glamorous style destination.

I bought an interesting Japanese novella, The Transparent Labyrinth by Keiichiro Hirano, and had my eye on a cool inflatable bonsai for my new place only to be told it was for display only, not sale.

Hong Kong’s coolest corner

A while back I shared on the blog of a very cool little corner of Causeway Bay known as ‘Caroline Hill‘.  Located on a single block of aging tenement buildings and one way streets, it is a peaceful oasis of old-style Hong Kong with the added bonus of a small run of some of the city’s coolest stores tucked away in dim arcades and odd corners. I went back this week to show a friend and he was just as impressed as I had been.

Just inside one of the dingy arcades is a closet-sized space called “In Between” with a perfectly curated stock of dried sea anenome doorhandles and lamps made out of driftwood, colourful Top Shop socks, beautiful jewellery, leather camera straps, antique bird prints, viny records and 1970s Polish film posters like the one below for – of all things – Jodorowsky’s “Sacred Mountain”.

As a bonus, the staff were super friendly and the store was hosting a one-wall exhibition of queer photography by a local artist, Donald Lung.

After this we checked out a cluster of other funky stores in the retro arcades.

There is a classic mens tailor (with a hipster twist) Hola, Gasset Liberal for homewares and Luddite, another menswear store, specialising in battered canvas bags and old medals incribed with Russian and Arabic.

But the other standout store for me was Bunkaya Zakkaten, a store located in the bowels of one of the old buildings, behind a buzzing green neon sign. Inside, and even outside, it brims full of cheap and cheerful Japanese accessories and homewares that veer between chic and cheesy. Think novelty sunglasses, rings in the shape of cats’ heads and sofa cushions shaped like babies, gaudy jewellery, cute printed pencil cases and vintage mens and womens clothing.

Afterwards we headed over to Wonderdog  for one of its delicious kimchi-dogs, only to find that the menu has changed. Oh no! We got wasabi-dogs instead and admired the orange painted pop art wall mural.

Apparently there are plenty of other little places to explore to that I missed out on this time – see this article from Timeout HK a while ago.

Causeway Bay coral reef

Amazing window of an aquarium shop in my new favourite neighbourhood

 

More Manila Cool

 

Cubao X, short for Cubao Expo, is the stretch of bars I had intended to hit after “Vincent Van Gogh is Bipolar”. That did not happen but luckily I made it anyway, because I had to go back to Cubao to catch my bus for the airport (as this was a Sunday the traffic gods were merciful, and it only took forty minutes).

Cubao itself is not very appealing, full of even more garishly painted jeepneys in honking jeepney-jams, bare concrete and a dingy “Isetann” department store, with girls in tight dresses dancing to Pitbull outside (just like the real Isetan, NOT!)

But it has one gem. The Cubao Expo is Manila’s unlikeliest hipster hangout. It is a short U-shaped street forming a quiet compound in a former shoe trade centre. Today some of the shoe shops live on, mixed with the city’s most alternative minded bars (one named after the Brit band, Mogwai) and a selection of Western-style hipster thrift stores selling odd combinations of old vinyl, Filipino mountain woodcarving, gay coffee table books and vintage clothing. The place is said to be most happening at night, although I found it charming in the afternoon in a dozy, just-woken-up kind of way. It reminded me of Melbourne’s Fitzroy, or the coolest bits of Ari in Bangkok: in other words, it was funkier than I thought Manila would be, (and much cooler than anywhere in Hong Kong). Next time I’ll definitely drop by after dark (and head back to  Vincent van Gogh… while I am at it).

  

Much closer to Makati but with a similar sensibility is the new artspace “DAGC” or “Department of Avant Garde Cliches”. It sits in the back  of  a strip mall down an utterly unremarkable street of offices near Magellanes subway station. But inside there are prints by local artists and a selection of art books imported from Berlin. The friendly currator told me I had just missed a show on Australian artists. Definitely a place to keep an eye on.

There is a dinosaur in the window

At Harvey Nichols, Pacific Place. And it is made out of coathangers.

Look what I found

 

A North Point walk

North Point is the bustling residential neighborhood between Fortress Hill and Quarry Bay. It fills a narrow strip of land between the hillside and the sea just a few blocks wide. The neighbourhood follows Kings Road, with its trams and crowds, and also takes in a ferry terminal, a few local shopping centres and some interesting little sidestreets with crowded footpath markets. Its one of the few areas of Hong Kong Island that has not yet been gentrified. Although annoyingly crowded at times, it still has a gritty “for-the-people” vibe quite unlike the rarified (and boring) streets of Central.

It also has a few little spots of particular interest.

The walk from Quarry Bay to Causeway bay (the way I usually walk) hits North Point right outside at the blue and white art deco Hong Kong Funeral Home. This building – one of the most elegant  in Hong Kong, in my opinion – stands amid its  clutch of  florists specialising in white lily wreathes.

 

Soon after appears the Sunbeam theatre, not far from the ferry stop. This is the last place on Hong Kong island to see Cantonese traditional opera. Its 70s style  globe-lamp-lit foyer is always crowded with pensioners on their way to the matinee, huge garlands of flowers and garish cardboard cutouts of the actors on show. The theatre hit the headlines this week with its impending closure – the Opera company could no longer pay the rent and it seemed as if the landmark was destined to close. Hong Kong was going to lose another little bit of its soul, which has so steadily been chipped away bit by bit. But on the very day it was supposed to close, in a cinematic last minute gasp a donor came through with the cash. The future of the theatre, though shaky, was granted a reprieve.

 

Further along down Kings Road on the corner is this bizarre hulk of a building – a former theatre or market perhaps? What is the purpose of the concrete spans over its roof? I had been past in a tram a few times and tried to figure out what it was, to no avail. This time I ventured in on foot. The outside of the building, complete with eroded grimy frieze over the door, was covered in bamboo scaffolding. Inside a rabbits warren of dim corridors revealed shuttered shops and then odd businesses – a brothel and an elderly persons’ home. Is the building being demolished? And what was it?

After this puzzle I was stopped in my tracks by a discovery even more exciting. In a little sidestreet near Fortress Hill subway station, underneath a dingy freeway flyover is a branch of one of my favourite old Tokyo shops. I had no idea “Village Vanguard” had a branch in Hong Kong! Yet venturing down the stairs I found a large store full of the cute novelty items, funky books and homewares that make the store so popular in Kichijioji, Shimokitazawa and Jiyugaoka. I walked out with a faux-snow leopard rug, a VIP members card and this hilariously awful coin wallet:

 

I will be back soon (and often!).

The hot mango men of Silom

My friend Mond pointed out a small yellow booth to me on the side of Silom Road. It was, he told me, “the hot mango smoothie men”. I asked him to elaborate and he told me that the mango smoothie stall was well-known for its hot gay staff, who have even been featured on TV as “the mango smoothie guys gay men love”. The stall itself, well-positioned between the Soi 4 and Soi 2 club strips, has flyers for gay clubs and underwear on the counter and signs like this:

The smoothies are pretty good too.

 

 

Dongdaemun

 

Dongdaemun is Seoul’s, well, soul. It is noisy with the sound of tinny music and excited chatter, always crowded, concrete and congested, and smells of hotdogs and diesel exhaust. But it is also fun. Dongdaemun is not so much a market (although if it were, it would surely be the biggest in the world), as a whole city district of interconnected markets, mind-boggling in its vastness.

The action fills up several mini-skyscraper multilevel buildings, burrows underground into arcades that snake out of its two subway stations, and flows into surrounding streets in all directions. Merchants, wholesalers, intellectual property pirates and shoppers converge here to buy and sell clothes and fabrics in the main part of the market, as well as a whole range of highly specialised and shadowy ‘side markets’.

It is a round-the-clock phenomenon that has to be visited at least twice – once in the day and once in the night – to do it justice.

The market is named after the famous “East Gate”, one of the city’s most iconic landmarks although currently under wraps for renovations. (This is a shame because the other famous city gate at Namdaemun is not on display either at the moment, having been burned down by some arsonist asshole in 2008).

From the old Dongdaemun city gate on warm weekends, a plant and flower market spreads up the shabby main street of Seoul, Jong-no, with stalls selling rhododendron plants in pots, orchids and bonsais, herbs and occassionally squirrels in little cages or glazed ceramic pots. When I was there though, in the dead of winter, it was much diminished.

Walking in the other direction is the pet market with its streets of goldfish and snapping turtles and occasionally cute little hedgehogs, and then the stationary market with its mounds of wholesale stickers and glittery pens.

Here, the market is dissected by what was once a freeway and is now the Cheonggye stream (see below) . Crossing over this, the crowds thicken and the commerce reaches a screaming climax in the ApM and Migliore malls, towers packed full of stalls and boutiques, with 24 hour cinemas and customers around the clock.

On the corner of the Cheonggye stream and this main strip is a little magazine market. A couple of stores sell an amazing stash of fashion magazines from around the world – Japan especially but also Europe, the USA and of course Korea. I used to come here all the time for a touch of glamour – so often missing in grey, gritty Seoul – but in my youth I never realised its main purpose. Fashion pirates come here to flick through magazines and choose pages to show to their Dongdaemun suppliers, ready to whip up low cost immitations of the latest trends as factory samples.

 

The main stretch of Dongdaemun is a cacophony of pressing bodies, gaudy clothes and the smell of Korean snacks. There is nothing classy about it – its cheap, fast fashion. Although you do find occassional gems, for the most part the clothes here are fun and more or less disposable.

My favourite part of the market was tucked away in a little corner of Dongdaemun. In my day it was behind a second-rate baseball stadium, lined with stalls selling 1970s Korean motorcycle jackets. Now, in a sign of Seoul’s upgraded aspirations, this has been converted into a Zaha Hadid “design centre”, currently under construction.

Here is a smaller pocket of multilevel buildings,  the nocurnal wholesale malls. These operate from 10pm to 10am. Inside, all night long, the cramped floorspace is subdivided into stalls and the floor littered with plastic wrapping. Piles of garments block the fire exits, and vendors chat or sit wearily while eagle-eyed shoppers circulate. One of the malls here, ApM (not to be confused with the larger Hello ApM mall on the main strip) was my favourite place for cheap, funky mens’ clothes; it had lots of cute Tshirts and interesting Korean-designed tops. I would go every week before clubbing, buy a Tshirt, wear it out and more often than not, watch it fall apart in the wash the next week. Yet some of my most treasured Tshirts, to this day,  I got here.

 

I have no recollection of how I discovered the place, it is not exactly easy to find.

On the way back to rediscover the mall, I looked out for a familiar landmark, the blue neon-flashing Nuzzon building. For many years this was covered with a billboard of Kate Moss and played the 1980s Ghostbuster theme at all hours of the night. Yet for all its eagerly projected fun and glamour and flashing lights, the building always struck me as sinister, an Orwellian Ministry of Style. Its harried, tired-looking vendors, trying to warm themselves with their instant noodles under harsh fluorescent lights at 3am, were a reminder that for most of its employees, the global textile industry is nothing but a hard, thankless slog.

I searched around here for the junior ApM; only to find it gone, or at least renamed. Most of the malls here no longer sold mens’ clothes at all.

Another interesting branch of the market follows the Cheonggye stream Westwards. If you follow it, you come to a neighbourhood of super-specialised shops that sell not fashion, but individual components for the fashion trade. There are whole shops full of buttons, or zips, or ribbons and mounds of mannequins, and streams of fur fluttering out of street trees where they have been left to hang. After this you soon come to a cluster of lighting stores and then, in a dank warren of alleyways under a freeway, a Blade Runner-ish electronics market. Circuit boards and semiconductors are traded in scruffy,dimly lit family businesses totally at odds with their high tech gleam.

Dongdaemun had one last surprise for me too. A new immigrant district, named Russiatown, has sprung up in an alleyway near the former stadium. Here, a despondent-looking community of Russian-speaking traders gathers. Some are from Russia itself but most hail from the Central Asian republics – Uzbekhistan and Kazahkstan. They are in Seoul to buy for their import businesses. There is also a ten-storey building of small shops and businesses aimed at Mongolian traders. Cyrillic writing peeps out of signs for “Mokba mart” supermarket or shashlik restaurants.

Dongdaemun’s tentacles are spreading ever further.

Luxury goods brand evicted – to Mongolia

Shanghai Tang, the slightly gauche luxury goods retailer, has been pushed out of its iconic store in Hong Kong’s Central district by rising rents. Their prime former location has been snapped up by Abercrombie & Fitch who have set tongues wagging with the reputed HKD 8 million per month they will pay for the property. Gap is moving in next door.

Shanghai Tang has been forced to decamp to, of all things, a bunch of tents on the roof of the city’s ferry terminal. The “Shanghai Tang Mongolian Village” is being marketed as a temporary ‘pop up store’ with a Genghis Khan theme; the goods are all stocked in circular yurts on a paddock of the kind of plastic-fake-grass used in Australian to display meat in butchers shop windows.

Its a brave and creative solution – but also a transparent one. What does it mean when luxury goods retailers can no longer afford Hong Kong rents and are literally left squatting in tents on the city’s streets?

Gage Street

The short stretch of Gage Street is one of my favourite parts of Hong Kong. Located in the tony Midlevels, starting under the shadow of the famed “escalator”, it is surprisingly bereft of expat-aimed businesses. Instead of chain coffee stores and crappy bars, the street still retains its rough-and-ready Chinese flavour with fruit, flower and fish stalls, meat hanging on butchers hooks and blood in the gutters. Alleyways crammed with yet more stalls branch off steeply down the hillside towards Sheung Wan, strung with fluttering Tibetan prayer flag-style banners. It is very atmospheric.

Among all of this (and the discount clothing stores) there are a couple of interesting shops too – the city’s funkiest fruit seller directly opposite the dirt cheap tiki-kitsch-styled Chuk Yuen Vietnamese restaurant decked out in thatch and green ironwork designed to look like bamboo.

Finally there is Recycled, a great store selling the recycled-from-newspaper wallets and bags sold in Hong Kong outlets like G.O.D. – here at greatly reduced prices.

Hong Kong alternative

This week I dropped by Kubrick’s, the book-cafe attached to the Yau Ma Tei arthouse movie theatre, only to find it closed (temporarily, I pray!) Meanwhile, my recent explorations of the city’s ‘underground(ish)’ nightlife had been remarkably unsuccessful – a visit to the supposedly “Berlin-style art bar” XXY found it closed and locked up.

Time to find new pastures then! On my daytrip out to Lamma Island I dropped by the famous Bookworm Cafe, a screamingly hippy organic vegan restaurant on the laidback, but still yuppified, island. It was awesome. There was reggae playing, mismatched patchwork cushions, delicious pumpkin soup and faux-caffeine-free-coffee made from chicory root (actually quite good!) The shelves were loaded with tattered old books to read and the placemat was a “guide to winning an argument with a meat-eater,” (did you know women who eat more than one egg a week have three times the risk of Ovarian cancer?). It was so…un-Hong Kong. I loved it. I’ll definitely go back. I’d say its even worth coming out from Central just for a leisurely lunch there.

The other stop was less impressive – White Noise Records, an “indie” record store in Causeway Bay. On my last visit I had arrived the day after they closed (typical) to transfer to a new address. While the old store was in a hella-dirty old building covered in vibrant grafitti and entered through a virtual secret passage (you had to push through a sidewalk jewellery stall) the new address in on the 19th floor of an office building. You would never find it if you didn’t know where to look. Unfortunately the owners seem to like it that way. When I walked into the room, smaller than an average Australian lounge, I was was greeted with ten minutes of uncomfortable silence from the clerk. Not so much as a nod, or a raised head. I thought that was a bit cold. So I left. I didn’t really see anything I needed to buy anyway, although the sections had interesting labels – ‘Math rock’, a whole wall of “Japanese noise” and some “Finnish underground”.

STOP PRESS: Causeway Bay on its way up…and out?

Recently I wrote about my plans to visit the After School Cafe, an amusing-sounding classroom-themed cafe hidden in the upper storeys of a Causeway Bay office building. This week I went…and it wasn’t there. It turns out the building has been redeveloped into an Omega watch store. I asked for directions from a woman working at a local mall, enquiring for just the street number not the name of the business and she replied: “Do you want the After School Cafe? So many Westerners have been asking for it lately, but it closed down”. So much for the hype, then.

Dejected, I decided on a Plan B, another of the supposedly quirky and hip little coffee shops hidden above Causeway Bay’s heaving streets. This one was called Bookcafe…and it too was closed. A premature end to Causeway Bay’s cool cafe revolution?

STOP PRESS AGAIN: So it seems After School Cafe just moved a few doors down the road, to the same building as the “Homeless” homewares store. 

STOP PRESS AGAIN AGAIN: As of September 2011 After School seems to have closed in its newer location as well.

Perhaps it is not surprising. I was reading in the newspaper this week that retail rents in the district have now topped Tokyo’s famed luxury hub in Ginza. The whole of Hong Kong is bring driven ever more upmarket. Even a square metre of retail space in thronged but downmarket Mong Kok now costs more than on Singapore’s showpiece Orchard Road.

As I was leaving Causeway Bay though I noticed a busy crew putting finished touches on to a brand new flagship store for the Japanese streetwear brand Bathing Ape (with which Hong Kong has always had an unhealthy fascination).

More bling and less quirk. Great. Just what Causeway Bay needed.

A Dog’s Life

The Ozono Mall at the end of winding condo-lined Soi 39 (Soi Phrom Phong) is a shopping centre with a difference: it is for dogs. The shops of the ‘pet mall’are clustered around a grassy little square where a dozen or so terriers were running free when I was there, while their owners sat in cafes or browsed homewares in the surrounding stores, watching through the big glass windows. Of course, there are also numerous shops selling pet paraphernalia (including a professional dog photographer), grooming services and the ‘Petropolitan Dog hotel’. At the end of the central square is a walled garden entered through large wrought iron gates and watched  over by a large picture of the King with a great dane, and a stern “members only” sign. From what I could glimpse through gate, it looked like a tropical Garden of Eden, a paradise for the lucky dogs whose owners signed up.

What really shocked me is that directly next to the decadence of these pampered pooches is a slummy encampment where human beings live in little huts constructed of sheet iron ( they must be baking in the midday sun). Unlike in other cities I have seen in the developing world, these jarring juxtapositions of poverty and wealth are not common in Bangkok. Here, usually, rich neighborhoods are rich and poor neighborhoods are poor. I was surprised to to see them here cheek by jowl … and not a little disgusted.

How much is that doggie in the window?

Incredible!

What do you do when you are half way through refurbishing your pad in maximalist OTT style, and find that you are all out of ostrich eggs and life-sized bronze monkeys? In most cities you would be stumped, but in Bangkok you would be spoiled for choice. You could try Tuba, or its across-the-street furniture store or the Lad Phao homewares offshoot, Papaya. But to be honest I didn’t see ostrich eggs in any of them. “Incredible”, on the other hand, had mounds of them.

The store is literally stacked full of stuffed porcupines, antelopes and humming birds, tribal sculptures, bronze cats and the afforementioned monkeys (as well as ostrich eggs in ostrich-shaped bronze holders), metre-long disembodied Buddha’s hands, those feathered fans pharaonic slaves are always holding in old Hollywood movies and the kind of furniture seen in the harem of the Topkapi Palace. It is, indeed, incredible.

Unfortunately, as in so many Thai shops, you are shadowed mercilessly by a smiling shop assistant who prevents you from pocketing anything – or taking any pictures.

Incredible is located at 20/3 Soi Prasarnmitr (Sukhumvit Soi 23) on a winding stretch of condo buildings and expensive-looking hostess clubs, Japanese and Russian restaurants, just behind Soi Cowboy

Bangkok Gothic

At first glance, Bangkok might seem like the least Goth city in the world. Decked out in hot pink, screaming orange and butter yellow, overflowing with cutesiness and with its very un-introspective preoccupations with food and sex, you could be forgiven for thinking the city doesn’t have a moody side. But you would be wrong. Death and the macabre are also one of the main factors at play in the city’s imagination as this, this, this and most of all this illustrate only too well.

I had even discovered this site detailing the city’s “ten scariest haunted houses” – which hopefully I will be able to report back on in more detail soon. But in the meantime, I decided to take a look at another (perhaps tamer) slice of life on the Bangkok dark side.

Mansion7 is a “boutique thriller mall”, a themepark-ish collection of bars and restaurants clustered around a “neglected garden” and a stageset of a haunted house in a hangar-sized property in the Rachada nightlife district. It opened last Halloween. Inside, under a floating “full moon” lamp, shoppers can check out upmarket little sexy lingerie shops, or eat at a som tam (papaya salad) restaurant where meals are determined by your blood type. There is also a fantastically noir and forboding cocktail lounge, whose soaring walls are lined with shelves of evil-looking gnomes, and slowly turning fans in industrial vents.

But the real star attraction is the “haunted house’ tour. The back story is this: During the reign of Rama V (the 19th century) the king’s physician lost his only daughter, and driven mad by grief, installed a basement laboratory to conduct experiments trying to revive her. The complex centred around a “dissection” room where wanderers ended up “donating” different organs, after which they were never seen again.

All of this is narrated in a spooky-looking courtyard (airconditioned to enduce goosebumps) and then in pairs, you are sent to wander (or run) through the winding, darkened corridors of the “haunted house”, holding a rope so you don’t get separated, as actors jump out at you from side doors screaming.

It is all great fun.

Mansion7 is not the city’s only establishment with a ‘dark vibe’ however. Another I loved was “Iron Fairies,” a dimly lit speakeasy, entered through a black curtain with live jazz band playing from the rafters above (!)

Most amazing though is that it is also a blacksmithy. The bar is scattered with iron creatures (hence the name) and metal-working equipment, kind of a 1920s/pre-industrial chic/ jazz age bar with a “beautiful people” crowd. As Daisuke and I sat with our drinks, Ananda Everingham walked in. He was ushered up to a little “secret room” (entered through a revolving book case, no less!) but I could still watch him through a little peephole. Although I didn’t, because that would have been creepy. Also, I didn’t really want to be seen waving my camera around since there was a celebrity on site, so these pics, with the exception of the last are “borrowed” from other people.

This looks fun: discobeans

Japanese home-style cooking, “a performance space” and “REAL underground Japanese fashion”. In Northcote. More info here

The new, Japanese Melbourne

On Saturday night, I ended up at “Robot”.  It is a Japanese themed bar in the city, with staff from Tokyo, manga-inspired artworks and a bar stocked full of Kirin (both domestically-brewed and Japanese) , Asahi and Yebisu (as well as Tiger, Tsingtao, Kingfisher and Singha).

It made me realise that Melbourne now has its own little Japanese “circuit”. There are movies, music CDs and TV dramas for sale at the big Japanese/Chinese/Korean DVD store on Bourke Street then just around the corner, tucked up on the fifth floor of an office building the Kanga Kanga Japanese magazines store,  Tokuya across the street and now Daiso in Richmond, with a stop on the tram-ride for a bath at the Japanese sento halfway.

Plus: T-shirts from Graniph and Aoi, the Lounge bar and nightclub which is always mysterious popular with young Japanese travellers, and of course a whole bunch of Japanese restaurants around town. And, more surprisingly a Japanese serviced apartments block in South Yarra (I just discovered) and a dealer specialising in Japanese gay art. I just wish my favourite Japanese soul food cafe, the old Kappa-ya was still open …

The Social Studio

The Social Studio, a small space tucked away on Smith Street just next to Video Busters, is an example of what makes Melbourne great. It is an offbeat, little specialist haven with a rough, funky aesthetic –  and a social conscience. The shop provides a training workshop and retail space for young Africans interested in the fashion industry. There is also a cafe at the back.

In the ever-gentrifying Smith Street strip, it is truly a step back in time to the old-skool Fitzroy. The African-based meals are hearty but basic, and served in a bright yellow painted kitchentte where you sit on old cushions, amid taped-up articles on the walls, wobbly tables and a portaloo out the back. There is  none of the pretentiousness of most of the new places that have opened here lately with their vogueish interiors and fashionable menus.

It is a real one-of-a-kind.

It was a well-timed find too, because next week Social Studio is hosting a “street party” in collaboration with the (ironically-named?) boutique “Hunter Gatherer”. Its on from 6pm on Friday.

Daiso!

After what seems like months of waiting, the Daiso store on Victoria Street has now opened.  It represents the biggest name in Japanese retail to hit the city since the ill-fated Daimaru Department Store (in fact, its a much bigger name in much of Japan than the Osaka-centric department store chain). The Melbourne branch of  Daiso’s “100 yen store” sells all its items (imported in the original Japanese packaging)  for $2.80 each,  a hefty 150+ % markup. What does it mean when a Japanese store can double its prices and still be considered “budget” in Australia?

But I was happy to grab a basket and purchase away, as was the rest of the enthusiastic ( and mostly Asian crowd). Such is the allure of the Daiso brand. The selection is much better than at Melbourne’s other “100 yen store” Tokuya (in the city) with six aisles crammed full of personal care items, kitchenware, stationary, costume jewellery and plastic toys, snacks and cosmetics, and more to come as the store is yet to be completed.

I bought a grasshopper-shaped fridge magnet, heart-shaped rhinestone keitai stickers, some skin cream, cuttable magnetic strips and a magic sponge.

Daiso is located in the new Aldi supermarket centre (also featuring an upscale Chinese bakery and a Japanese massage place), right next to the exponentially less glamorous homegrown budget store “Chicken Feed”, on Victoria Street, Richmond.