As you may have read/heard Christchurch has a serious café culture, you cannot walk two steps without being in a perfect triangulation of Starbucks. Thankfully there are enough cafes to go around where people are interested enough in having an individual style coffee without having to first re-mortgage their house. Tilly and I have had the pleasure of many a warm/hot weekend strolling around the streets sampling the delights, although there is hell to pay if "bagel heaven" isn't open when Tilly needs one of their delicious bagels!! But the other Saturday I remembered that during my bus ride home I had noticed an unremarkable building that had rainbows on the windows, this means either one of two certainties, a) it is a Christian place b) it is a gay place. I prayed that it was the latter. The windows were blacked out so I\'m guessing I was in with a good chance. So explaining this to Tilly we walked the short distance to the shop, as we approached a very effeminate guy emerged with a sandwich board which he erected outside on the pavement, it read "AltSex Cafe - we don't sell coffee" and at that point we knew we had to enter to see what the hell this place was about - dear readers I was truly unprepared for what I was about to see. We walked through the door asking the gentleman if there were any places lesbians could hang out (the gay man is always catered for in abundance), nothing fancy, just a safe place where people wouldn't stare if you wanted to hold hands etc. I was busy listening to his response so took a little while to take in my surroundings. It was a small shop, very small in fact, anymore than 3 people in there and it's going to be difficult to breathe. It's mainly black except for the items it sells, and even some of these delights are black. You enter and face a wall of videos, the usual videos, man on man, woman on woman (what the hell are those nails about though??) arse, titty, anything and everything you could ever get off on. Fine, I'm cool with that, pick up a few just because the titles sound familiar but so so different when I see the pictures I am faced with. Then there is the magazine rack, all male orientated, bar our good ol' Diva mag, which is so expensive here I can make do without. Then my eye wanders to one of the two display cabinets. The first is a S&M persons heaven - masks, c*** rings, whips, nipple clamps, you name it its here, even things I had to ask the name of and surprisingly a lot of these came with an electric shock option, hey, it's a free world man. After making my way through this lot I stumble, slightly light headed at everything I have taken in, and find myself leant against the second cabinet, so I take a look and I am pretty sure my eyes bulged visibly from their sockets at this point. Firstly there were the gloves, I have seen washing up gloves but never anything like this. You know in films when people are working with the biohazard suits? These gloves were that hardcore, only for the hardcore. They were huge and didn't look like they had much give in them, they were even elbow length. The gentleman explained that when most people fist, you go to your elbow - let's just say I ain\'t ready for that just yet. Then there was the dildos, ok, I have been to Sh! In London, but they ain't got nothing on this place. They looked like the size of a full grown man's forearm, no word of a lie. I nearly fainted there and then thinking of who could take that and how they walk afterwards! But my real surprise set in when I eyed a familiar looking object in an unfamiliar place. Let's talk traffic cones - yep, you read that right, traffic cones. Obviously they weren't the really big ones (I'm guessing they were stored out back), more the ones you would mark out a sports pitch, but still big enough. The width made my eyes water, especially when the guy explained that this wasn't the largest size they had. He also explained that they sold each one with a black light pen so people could mark their progress, I laughed, he didn't, he was serious. So after regaining control of speech we talked about what else happened here, it's a gentlemen's sauna, where on Saturdays you HAVE to be naked. It was odd thinking that at that time I was merely meters away from lots and lots of totally naked men and how totally wasted this was on me..... something to think about I suppose....