My newest Dollfie Dream girl arrived a few days before Christmas, courtesy of an amazing seller and my aunt bringing her up from Los Angeles – Volks DDS Akira! She’s my first Dollfie Dream Sister doll, and I adore this body type! I like that she’s a little bit smaller than the other big DD girls (but not too much) but still has great poseability! I spent the first couple of days with her trying on lots of wigs to see which one will be “hers” and in the end I’ve decided that while she may masquerade as a blonde or brunette every so often, she will be my peach baby!

I love her adorable little smile and her big green eyes! Her smaller body also lent itself to being packed in a suitcase easily I brought her with me this past weekend to visit London, UK! She borrowed a pretty outfit from Lily, some boots from Alisanne, put on a lovely wig to coordinate and off across the Atlantic we went!

First stop was lunch at L’Atelier de Joël Robouchon with my cousin (our favourite lunch spot), and afterward we were joined by Jezatron, Cookiedude_2332 and PockyKai and we moved up to their lounge for dessert and cocktails. I stupidly forgot to charge my camera battery, so I didn’t take too many photos because I was trying to conserve the 1% battery power that I had left >__<”

Here’s the artichoke soup appetizer, and the delicious pork belly main course – and some super girly cocktails!

Photo by Josh Ng (CookieDude_2332)

After lunch, my cousin went off to do her own thing, and the rest of us walked up to the British Museum because I was interested in one of their temporary exhibits. Hokusai’s Under the Wave, off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami-ura), also known as “The Great Wave” on display until January 8, 2012 and I wanted to take advantage of my time in London to check out this famous wood-block print! As with most famous works of art, I’m usually struck with how small they are in real life since museum posters always make them seem huge and you can never get a sense of scale out of a book. The Great Wave was much smaller than I anticipated, but the beautiful blue colours were so vivid and striking. Here’s Gabrielle showing off the print –

The lighting in the room is rather awful, but I did the best that I could >__<”

After leaving the museum, we did a bit of geek shopping at Forbidden Planet before walking down to Picadilly Circus to meet up with fellow Japanophiles GabrielVH, DarkDollhouse, fransgaard and Matt. We had dinner at the restaurant in Mitsukoshi, which is a famous Japanese department store. Kev & I had afternoon tea at the Ladurée tea room in the Mitsukoshi at Ginza, Tokyo last year. On previous visits to London I’ve seen hoards of Japanese tourists dropped off by the bus load to shop in there – it’s full of luxury brands and things from Harrods. It was always amusing to me that the tourists would travel from Japan to London to shop at a store that exists at home.

Several of us shared the Shabu Shabu and Sukiyaki hotpot dishes and here they are being set up for delicious feasting!

And this was my gorgeous dessert – their monthly special which was strawberry sorbet and molten chocolate cake.

After dessert, the dolls came out! Here is GabrielVH’s Sakura looking very sweet and lovely. It was my first time seeing a Sakura sculpt in person and I was taken with how pretty she is – I think she is definitely quite under rated as far as DD popularity goes.

Here’s my Gabrielle hanging out with Dark Dollhouse’s Sakuya. You can definitely see the height difference between the DDS and DD3 bodies – even though Sakuya is on a stand and Gabrielle is in heels!

Photo by Robert Tolton (Gabriel VH)

Here are all the girls hanging out at the same end of the table: Sakura, Mio, Sakuya and Gabrielle (with GabrielVH’s little Azone girl too!)

Photo by Robert Tolton (Gabriel VH)

There was a little girl having dinner with her family in the booth next to us who kept peeking up over the partition to see what we were up to – it was quite cute! Oh, and Matt is making bunny ears on Sakura 😛

Later on, Backpacking Tarepanda popped out to join in the fun. It’s been a while since I’ve taken him out for pictures, even though he’s always in my suitcase!

Photo by DarkDollhouse

I had a wonderful evening out with everyone, and we are already planning our next meetup for January! ^__^” Thank you everyone for coming out; it was so much fun! I wonder what we’ll eat next time? ^__~”

Photo by Robert Tolton (Gabriel VH)