Osaka Day 0

I wrote all this on the plane at about midnight, eastern time, while on the plane to Osaka.

How strange...

My watch (and brain) says it is midnight. I have another two or so hours before landing. However, it's bright as day out, as the local time is somewhere around 3 or so in the afternoon... (I left Vancouver at 1:05 local time and land in Osaka before 4 local time... So it must be sometime between those).

Traveling west is a bit of a head trip... Hooray for the 35 hour day.... And I'm still too giddy to sleep. I'm going to sleep well tonight... Whenever that is. I think they're going to serve another meal before landing. I hope.

I've watched quite a few movies today on the seat back video screens to pass the time.

Quick reviews:
Away From Her - very very sad, but very well done, telling the story of a couple in their early 60s, and the tragic tale of the wife's battle with Alzheimer's. It seemed to hit extra hard as its set very close to where I live (Brant county)
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - incredibly bad. Worst acting I've seen all day. Strange casting choices...
The Time Machine - actually moderately entertaining and not too bad.
Air Canada enRoute Student Short Film Festival - short films by Canadian students in film schools, selected by a panel of judges. These were around 10 minutes long, and I watched about two hours of these. They ranged from cute, to interesting, to confusing, to silly. Was a fun way to spend two hours.

My rowmate is an older Japanese woman who doesn't speak English, and has been watching movies most of the trip, but not listening to them... She's watching Paprika now (which is Japanese) and she might enjoy it if she was listening... She has headphones (passed out at the beginning of the trip) and I tried to offer to let her use my extra set (which shed be able to hear... The free ones don't block out any sound) but she wasn't having any of it.

Oh well.

Just a little more time to go...

Some hours later, I touched down at Kansai (KIX), had some short but confusing moments with customs and security, and walked out and ran into she_prime, my most gracious host of graciousness.

From there, we hopped onto a JR train into the city, which took the better part of an hour. Meg took me to her apartment where I unloaded my stuff, and then we went to seek dinner.

She took me to this place that she described as a "Japanese Denny's". Which quite intrigued me at that rather obscene our. (I think it was 27 o'clock for me at that point). So we arrived at "Royal Host", and it.. was kind of like a Japanese Denny's. I pointed at something on the menu, and Meg fielded the questions, and some time later, I had a tasty dish with rice, tasty beef, an egg, some mushrooms, onions, tofu... and a seaweed salad and miso soup, and this inscrutable but tasty dessert. She had a club sandwich and fries. *boggle* We then came back, and hung out for a bit, before I fell asleep...

Osaka Day 1

This refers to Thursday...

We woke up at the crack of stupid.. about 6 am...

We got up and showered and hung around and had breakfast (peanut butter on toast, refreshingly normal though the bread was a little weird, but not bad)... and then headed out to... Starbucks in the slightly more central part of the city.

We arrived, and the menu was in bilingual Japanese and English. I ordered a "tall iced caramel machiatto". She nodded and spouted something back at me. I nodded and gave her money. I said Arigato Gozaimasu cause that's what people do here. The drink was tasty.

We wandered around for a bit in arcade-style "malls", and ended up at a store called BIC Camera, which is a camera store, in the same way that London Drugs is a drug store. It's 7 floors, and has electronics, and household appliances, and stereos, and high end speakers and receivers (some with vacuum tubes!) and toilets, and fabric, and ... well.. everything. On the 8th floor was a 100 yen store (ie, a dollar store) where I took a picture of some Engrish gift bags, and even stranger is that French is becoming the new Engrish. I got some pictures of that.

On the 9th floor, was a "Big and Tall store", clearly directed at huge American men... the stuff there wouldn't fit me... But it was a treasure trove (of unfortunately overly expensive) Engrish shirts. There was one that looked like a Engrish Loreena McKennit poem/song.

From there, we went to a conveyor sushi restaurant, and had very tasty sushi, for about a $1 per plate. I had quite a bit, and it cost like, $7. Totally awesome.

Then we headed out to the first shrine of the trip, Sumiyoshi Taisha, which is apparently a shinto shrine, actually built before the Chinese influenced shrine architecture. It was quite large, and quite pretty, and there was a kitty wandering about, and I stepped into an area with trees, and got bit by like eleventy thousand mosquitos. (my legs are itchy!). Took lots of pictures. Nearby was a rather pretty park... Parkland seems to be rather rare here in Osaka.

Oh, incidentally, Japan is hot. 34C yesterday, but the humidity was relatively low.

Next up, we headed to the Umeda area of the city, and went up the Umeda Sky Building which was quite the trip. You go up in a glass elevator, which is glass on all four sides. Which is really rather trippy, and moderately terrifying. You can then go on the roof, which is rather pretty, and see Osaka. It's very huge and dense. The only thing moderately similar to this view is seeing Manhattan from the Empire State Building, but it's totally not the same... We stayed up there and watched the sunset from the 39th floor cafe while sipping Coke and eating Cake.... Very pretty. We then went back up, and looked at the city at night. It wasn't particularly busy, and unlike back home, security was pretty much nonexistent, and a lot less tourist kitsch.

Then, deciding we shouldn't overload me with Japanese food all at once, we went for... Mexican.

It was very tasty, and we were serenaded by a Japanese man singing such classics as "Brown Eyed Girl", "Tears In Heaven", and "Your Song". The strange juxtaposition of Mexican food, 70s American Songs, and Japanese people nearly blew my brain. At about 9 pm, I started crashing hard, so we high tailed it back to Meg's, and crawled into bed at around 10. I woke up at 4, and putzed around on her laptop, attempting to catch up on LJ... then went back to bed around 6, and got up at 9 am again.

Quite a day. Very fun. But they can't all be like that or I'm going to be seriously burnt out.

I took LOTS AND LOTS of pictures, but don't have a convenient way to upload them now. Meg has sketchy-ass internet. :)