The first destination on my way to Bucharest was Dubai. My flight left Suvarnabhumi Airport at 12:20pm. On the BTS train a man randomly struck up a conversation with me and we turned out to be sitting on opposite sides of the aisle on the same flight to Dubai. He had a lot to talk about, and we chit chatted all the way to the gate. He said he had been visiting Bangkok on business. He worked in the hospitality industry and lived in Dubai.
The flight to Dubai was only 70% or so full. They were willing to sell me a ticket for 250 USD (I hesitated at first and had to spend 300 USD after the price went up) for the two flights all the way to Bucharest, but the flight wasn't nearly as bare bones as an AirAsia flight. They actually feed you for free on this flight -- like, a lot. Along with a box meal of chicken, potatoes and carrots, I was given this entire box of goodies:
Blurry because the camera was moving. The camera was moving because I wanted to take the picture quickly. I wanted to take the picture quickly because I didn't want to be the guy seen taking a food pic of his airplane food.
Dubai International Airport was backed up as we approached, so the pilot gave us a 15-minute sightseeing tour of the area 30 kilometers southeast of Dubai. Looking down on it from above, it's hard to believe humans were arrogant enough to inhabit this land. It's desert, in the sense of the most barren wastelands in Iraq that they show on the evening news type desert. No rivers, no lakes, not even any crops. Yet there are houses and cars and people being fueled by who knows what. The parts that aren't desert are uninhabitable rocky crags that look like they're made of the same stuff as the earth below them, but compressed into spikes, probably to further deter humanity from living here when they could go literally anywhere else on Earth.
Dubai itself is significantly more commercialized and extremely modern. It even has a few irrigated fields nearby. The city is situated in a place that has no natural vegetation (as far as I can tell) except for the occasional palm tree (or is it merely a mirage?), so any patches of land that aren't covered in concrete or irrigated look only partially finished -- as though construction workers decided to erect a building but neglect the landscaping.
The center of Dubai is silhouetted by sun and dust. The blurring is caused by a confused autofocus.
When our plane landed, the friend I had met on my way out of Bangkok asked if I wanted to stay for free at his family business here in Dubai. Of course I said yes! His driver picked us up and took us to Elite Residence Marina. It's not a luxury hotel like the ones so often advertised in Dubai, but having a room to myself with a queen size bed was heaven. The building is right next to the Burj Khalifa / Dubai Mall Metro Station, and 10-minutes of riding travelators will get you inside the Dubai Mall -- a lexicon of the world's most proliferate chain stores and high-end luxury brands. As far as I could tell, there isn't an easy way to walk to the base of the Burj Khalifa, so all I managed to do during my evening in Dubai was to get lost inside Dubai Mall.
My hotel was located directly above this cafe.
The view from the balcony outside my room. The Burj Khalifa is partially obscured by the second skyscraper from the left.
I had a few days in Bangkok before leaving for Bucharest. April is the hottest time of the year here, and temperatures reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. Nighttime temperatures are around 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite being 6-8 degrees hotter on average than when I first visited in December, subjectively it felt about the same. Walking around outside wasn't unbearable by any means; even sleeping in the un-air-conditioned dorm room at night was pretty simple after a shower and a bottle full of cool water by the bedside. I think my body's metabolism may have adjusted to the warmer climates I've been visiting. 65 degrees Fahrenheit was too cold to take off my sweater in Japan, and I remember the heat being overbearing in Bangkok when I first flew to Asia.
On Day 106 I went out and bought new socks and shoes to replace all the socks I'd lost and the shoes I had bought last time I was here, which had begun to fall apart. On Day 107 I went back to my favorite haunt, Too Fast Too Sleep, to write the previous blog post, which I had been dreading to write thus far. That evening I went out with Aaron (hostel owner), Nitty (Aaron's wife), and Eduardo (only other guest at the hostel, from Chile) for dinner at Silom Complex. Afterward we went to Patpong Night Market to eyeball all the kitschy merchandise the vendors were hawking and to meet up with a prior hostel guest, a friend of Aaron and Nitty. Having friends to go out into the city with for food makes the whole experience so much more enjoyable!
My flight to Chengdu didn't leave until 8:30pm so I found a cafe (Starbucks...) to sit in before coming back to the hostel to pick up my bags and buy lunch and dinner at the nearby supermarket. I left for Narita International Airport at 4:30pm, though Google told me it would only take an hour to get to the airport if I took the metro to Ueno Station and from Ueno took something called the "Skyliner" to the airport.
When I got to the JR Station in Ueno I surveyed the route map, didn't find anything clearly marked "Skyliner", but there was only one line that went out to Narita airport, so I bought a platform ticket and found the appropriate platform. When the train arrived it was labeled "Narita Express" so you knew it was fast. It wasn't.
The only thing express about the train was that it skipped 5 or 6 local stops on its way to Narita, but it still took 2.5 hours to get to Narita Station. From Narita Station I had to transfer trains to the Airport line. My flight left in one hour by this point. Luckily there was a train on the Airport line already waiting at the station and left within a minute of my boarding. Naturally, the terminal my flight left from was the final of the two stops along the Airport line. When I alighted at Terminal 1, my flight left in 45 minutes.
Naturally, the train drops you at floor B1, but the departures leave from the fourth floor. I didn't know this, so after paying off my platform ticket at the ticket counter I ripped up the escalators, stopping at a few information desks to ask where the Sichuan Airlines check-in was located. When I arrived out of breath at the check-in desk, they had already closed. My flight would be leaving in 35 minutes. They called the gate to ask if they were still able to accept me. They weren't. I'd missed my flight.
The next Sichuan flight to Chengdu didn't leave for 48 hours. They told me to contact the travel agency I had bought the ticket through (expedia.co.jp) to get my ticket date moved. It was 8pm on a Friday. I knew Expedia's customer service wasn't going to give a flying fuck until Monday, after the next flight would have already left. I emailed them anyways. (I turned out to be correct).
That was a stressful wall of text. Here's a squirrel driving his airplane.
I considered staying overnight at the airport, being (what I thought was) hours away from Tokyo and unfamiliar with the accommodation and transportation around Narita, but at 11pm decided instead to take the "Airport Limousine" bus back to central Tokyo and from there take the metro to the capsule hotel I had stayed at my first nights in Tokyo because I knew the reception was open 24 hours and they probably had room for me. After alighting from the bus and taking the metro to Oshiage, I tried taking the Tobu line to Asakusa Station, but a platform officer told me I had already missed the last train back. So I roamed the streets around Oshiage Station until I was able to wave down a taxi to take me to the hotel. When I arrived at Hotel Kawase some time past 1am I was able to book a capsule for the night.
The next morning I woke up to the little old lady that works at the hotel half slapping my backside, half spanking me awake. I hadn't forgotten that the check-out time was 10am, I just hadn't cared enough to set an alarm the night before. I told her I wanted to book one more night, but she only speaks Japanese, and so went to retrieve the other lady that works at the reception. The other lady walks into the room, says to me "Hello, pay money now" and walks out. I thought the whole scenario was mildly hilarious given how excessively polite Japanese people usually are. I booked one more night and spent the rest of the day looking for affordable tickets out of Tokyo -- either to Chengdu to catch my flight out of Chengdu, or to Bangkok to be ready for my flight to Bucharest. Regular, one-way flights to both Chengdu and Bangkok within the next few days were both around 350 USD (something I did NOT want to pay after paying less than 300 USD for Tokyo to Chengdu and Chengdu to Bangkok combined, plus they were terrible itineraries layover-wise), but I eventually found two one-way tickets -- one from Tokyo to Okinawa (Naha), the other from Okinawa to Bangkok -- for a combined total of less than 200 USD that would leave the next day. My flight from Tokyo left at 10am, so I woke at 6am, after three hours of sleep, to take the airport limousine bus back to Narita Airport around 7am.
The flight to Okinawa went off without a hitch and I spent the rest of the afternoon in nearby Naha. My flight to Bangkok didn't leave until 10pm.
Naha is a small, charming, humid subtropical Japanese town of about 320,000 residents. I visited a few parks while I was there. One of the parks has a beach.
The lone metro-like transportation service of the island can take you from the airport to north Naha
Near the pier
At 7:30pm I rode the monorail back to OKA and took a shuttle bus to the LCC terminal -- where all the budget airlines fly out of. When I punched in my booking number at the check-in machine it gave me an error and I had to ask an attendant to check me in manually. She worked on my ticket for a while, then came back to tell me I had booked my flight for a different date. I couldn't believe it, but when I checked my booking confirmation email, it had written on it Sunday, May 7th instead of Sunday, April 23. Somehow I had managed to screw myself over twice and buy a ticket for two weeks after I wanted to fly out of Okinawa.
Of course the airline couldn't just pat me on the back, tell me everyone makes mistakes, and move my ticket to today, so my two options were to stay in Okinawa and try to book an affordable flight to Bangkok by Wednesday morning, or shell out ¥24,000 for a new ticket on the same flight I had thought I paid ¥9,000 for the day before. At that point it was 8:30pm on a Sunday and I didn't trust myself to buy anymore flight tickets, so I begrudgingly handed over my debit card for the attendant to swipe while I drowned in an ocean of self-loathing.
If I had known I would have spent over 700 USD on flight tickets by the time I left Tokyo and arrived in Bangkok I would have bought myself the best first-class ticket with foot jacuzzi and therapy dog included and saved myself the stress -- and some money too, probably.
The gates at the LCC terminal are nearly monostic. There's a single room with chairs shared among the two gates, but not enough seats for everyone -- so 20-30% of passengers need to sit on the floor or stand. There's no wi-fi and no drinking fountain. The seat they had sold me wasn't expensive because it was nice, it was expensive (probably) because budget airlines' entire business model is only sustainable because of people like me.
I sat near the back of the plane (though the middle seat was unoccupied in my section, which was nice). Partway through the 4.5 hour flight we passed a lightning storm while flying over Laos. It was amazing to watch from above. I think if someone had given a lecture just then on how lightning works and what happens when lightning strikes a plane I would have remembered what they said for the rest of my life. I think teaching science facts while the topic of interest simultaneously potentially threatens your life could be a highly effective pedagogical technique.
I took a video with my phone, but it's absolute crap. It did look very similar to this, though:
After landing in BKK I took a taxi to Speakeasy Homestay, which I had previously stayed at my first two weeks in Bangkok. It was two in the morning by the time I arrived. Exhausted, but relieved to be done with all foreseeable bullshit, I took a cool shower before falling asleep in the un-air-conditioned, 85 degree Fahrenheit dorm room.
My sleep schedule had been unusual lately. For the past few weeks I'd found myself nearly always staying up past midnight and often sleeping in until past noon the next day. The pros of being a night owl were that nighttime is one of the quietest and peaceful times to be awake in Tokyo (unless you're looking for a party or bar, of which there are countless options), it wasn't close to warm during the day until noon or so, and I'd soon be traversing backwards through time zones, so staying up late now would make the transition to Chengdu and Bucharest easier. The cons were that a lot of cultural tourist activities like museums closed at 5pm, usual meal times went out the window and seemed to confuse my appetite, and even with a more than sufficient amount of sleep, sleeping 3am-12pm left me feeling tired and languorous most of the day.
Today was no exception to this recently established rule, and by the time I left to see the University of Tokyo, Japan's most prestigious university, they sky was already darkening.
The campus is nice (aren't they always?), but not overly impressive. A few things stood out to me about the university. One was Sanshiro Pond, which is a green space in the middle of campus with a walking path through it. The tract isn't landscaped like a garden, but more like a plot of land belonging to a Tokyo of the past that was never razed and developed. The other was the sitting areas around campus that were always overshadowed by ancient looking trees positioned in their center.
Overexposed to illustrate the cool tree branches （〜^∇^)〜
As nighttime took over, I found myself at yet another Starbucks. I swear I'm not going to Starbucks so often because I'm now a coffee addict! They're simply the most consistent places to go to for a table to sit at and free wi-fi. I almost inevitably order a tea, so I don't think it's the frequent Starbucks stops that have been altering my sleep pattern.
I took the Yamanote line to Shibuya station because I wanted to visit the massive record store there, Tower Records. I'm not usually a fan of record stores, partly because they don't really exist anymore in the US, but after the impression idol metal made on me I wanted to see if there were any other niche types of J-pop that I hadn't yet heard of but would enjoy. As soon as I left the station I recognized what I'd heard was the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world, Shibuya Crossing.
Shibuya crossing is a scramble crossing, meaning traffic is stopped in all directions to allow pedestrians to cross in whatever direction is most convenient for them.
View from Shibuya Station
In the middle of the action
Tower Records is a 5-minute walk north of the intersection. For the most part, the only thing I discovered from exploring the selection of Tower Records is that there is is an overwhelming amount of music artists out there, and I don't like most of them.
Hiromi, my favorite jazz fusion artist on the right! I listened to this collaboration album and didn't like it either.
Although there were an innumerable number of other stores in the area, I didn't feel like visiting any of them in particular and went back to the hostel after visiting Tower Records.
I had thought for a while that I would do something special, remarkable, or otherwise expensive to celebrate my 100th consecutive day of traveling, but I think yesterday just couldn't be topped. I hadn't yet seen Tokyo's CBD -- where staggering, dull buildings are home to the biggest financial, insurance, and telecommunication companies in Japan -- and so I hopped on the Hibiya line and got off at the station nearest to Tokyo station.
My map told me the Tokyo Stock Exchange was close by, which sounded pretty cool, so I wandered in that direction before turning towards Tokyo station. Right next door to the Tokyo Stock Exchange building is a "Seattle's Best Coffee" chain. According to the Wikipedia article on Seattle's Best Coffee, SBC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Starbucks. Who knew?
The Stock Exchange was closed for the day by the time I got there, and metal gates sat closed behind the glass doors and windows. I still don't know what goes on inside physical stock exchange buildings.
After circumventing Tokyo Station and the hordes of suits, I ended up in a park which, as far as I can gather, has no (transliterated) name.
I'd brought my puzzle book with me, so I found a bench to sit and solve puzzles while I watched the sun set behind the skyscrapers of Tokyo.
Not a good photo, but you get the idea
A moat surrounds the park, which is located near the Imperial Palace
I was leaving Japan in just a few days and had yet to book my accommodation in Chengdu, so I hunted down a Starbucks to finish my business before heading back to the hostel.
Check-out of Hotel Kawase was at 10am so I carried my bags to my new hostel, Hostel Bedgasm. I had booked this hostel weeks in advance so that I'd be sure to have a decent place to stay in Tokyo for at least part of my stay.
Visiting part of Ginza yesterday reminded me I had yet to see Nissan Crossing, which had been recommended to me by someone I'd met in the State Library of Victoria. Emerging from Ginza Station, the showroom wasn't difficult to find.
The showroom has only four cars on display on the first and second floors, but the real reason I had come was for the cafe hidden in the back of the second floor showroom. They have a latte machine there that will "print" a picture the baristas take of you into the crema atop your latte. Of course, I had to try it, and here's the result!
LOL
For ¥400, it's a fairly inexpensive gimmick.
Above the Nissan showrooms are Sony showrooms, and I had some fun playing with the fancy cameras and headphones. But for anyone who has been visiting multiple massive electronic stores in different parts of the world like I have, your eyes begin to glaze over pretty quickly at all the different models that are all just marginally different/faster than the previous one.
From the Nissan Crossing building I roamed the same street until a Yamaha sign caught my eye. Yamaha Ginza is a 13-floor building where the bottom floors are dedicated to showcasing instruments, sheet music, and CDs and the top floors are concert halls and music classrooms. The selection there is pretty incredible. As far as pianos, they had a Yamaha CF4 on display, as well as an 88-key Bösendorfer that I didn't catch the model of. And, of course, dozens of other less premium grands, uprights, and player pianos. Electric keyboards were a separate floor. Wind and percussion instruments had their own floor, as did stringed instruments. The Yamaha CF4 was selling for ¥12,000,000, and there was even a ¥1,200,000 violin bow for sale and plenty of rare, large, or otherwise impressive ¥1,000,000+ instruments. I tried out both the CF4 and the Bosendorfer. I liked them both, but the CF4 felt more familiar underneath my fingers.
From Yamaha Ginza I stopped by a toy store, but again failed to find an Otamatone. From the toy store I got pizza from a British-themed restaurant beneath the street before looking for a metro station I could get back to the Hibiya Line from. Along the way I got lost within the massive Shiodome underground walkway among a sea of salarymen and career women coming home from work. Eventually I found a metro entrance that I could transfer from to Iriya Station, near my hostel.
Back at the hostel I met some other guests that were going out for a live J-POP performance and I decided to join them. The venue, Pasela (or "Pasera" -- depending on if you go by the name on the building or the one on their Facebook page) Resorts Akiba Multi Entertainment, is located in Akihabara.
The entry fee was ¥1500, which gets you entry, a "voting coin", and a credit slip worth ¥1500 to be used on food or drinks. The concert was on the 7th floor and was one of the most unique experiences I've had thus far in Japan. Photography was prohibited, but their website has some good photos of the venue and what the show looks like. The performers that night were part of a collective known as Alice Project. Alice Project employs bands of young Japanese women that lip sing to idol metal pieces. Idol metal is a subgenre of Idol music and culture. What that means in practical terms is that young, kawaii Japanese women perform dance and music pieces on stage that are a blend of J-POP melodies and heavy metal riffs. The audience is nearly all Japanese men, some young, some old. The video below is one of the most popular songs from the main act that night:
I hadn't expected anything like it when I heard "We're going to a J-POP concert", but seeing it live was awesome. The crowd activity was way more organized than any other concert I'd previously attended. Each girl wears a colored sash and colored glow sticks are given out to audience members. When (for example) the blue sash-colored girl has the spot light during a performance, all the members with blue glow sticks will run to the base of the stage and thrust their sticks into the air. There were tenor-filled chants the audience would shout out in sync with the music, almost as if they were background singers. I had no idea how they knew when and what to chant; it was all very impressive.
Here's another performance by a much more famous idol metal group, Babymetal. The piece is called Gimme Chocolate!! The lyrics are all about how bad they want chocolate but they're afraid it will hurt their figure.
I find this all extremely entertaining, but it's hard not to find a tint of perversion to pubescent girls dancing and singing on stage for vast crowds of mostly men. But it's just one small part of Japanese popular culture which, given the high value placed on kawaii (cuteness) in everyday things, seems a not too unnatural outgrowth.
The voting coin they give you is supposed to be used to vote for your favorite girl. It was only later that I found out that the voting results are tied directly to each girls salary.
After the concert we went back to the hostel, then trudged through the rain to a bar a 15-minute walk away. I never got the name of the bar, but all drinks and kebabs on their menu were only ¥280 each exclusive of tax. Of course, we absolutely pulverized ourselves on the delicious appetizers and drinks and the bill still came out to ¥1700 each. Oh well 😋
Today was an unseasonably warm day, and after a lot of indecision about what to do on a Sunday, a day tourist activities were most likely to be crowded, I decided to go explore what looked like a series of large parks that were a bit out of the way of the usual touristy places in Tokyo.
It turns out the "large park" above is actually an entire palace complex and was completely closed off to the public by the time I arrived. I was still able to walk counterclockwise around the grounds. Just past the northern tip is a nice walking path that passes by Sophia University.
West of the university you can see Togu Palace, but it too was gated off.
Peeping through the gates
The northwestern tip turns into a large baseball complex and from there I walked back to the metro and took a train to the Shinbasi area -- partly for dinner, partly to see a different part of town.
Adjacent to Ginza, Shinbashi is flush with luxury shopping and dining, though not to the extent I imagine Ginza is.
A raised terrace in the Shinbashi area, by the Ghibli clock
I had a filling meal of spicy pork at a nice (but not too nice) looking restaurant. One of the items that comes with the meal is a soup that makes the roof of your mouth go numb. I wasn't sure how I felt about losing bodily sensation while eating, so I mostly left the soup alone.
Afterwards I felt like the perfect way to top the night off was with tea, pastries, and puzzle solving at whichever cafe I stumbled upon first (Starbucks, predictably). I actually had to wake up before 10 the next day to check out, so I left for the capsule hotel around 9:30.
A glimpse of Ginza before catching the metro back to the hotel
Since I had been so successful finding a Nikoli puzzle book yesterday, I decided to try my luck at finding an Otamotone within one of Japan's sprawling technology stores. After being tipped off by a year-old Reddit thread, I first looked in Yodobashi Multimedia Akiba, a massive 9-story venue dedicated to all types of electronics.
Toys were all stuffed onto the 6th floor, and after roaming the aisles for 30 minutes I finally managed to track down a not-extremely-busy-looking store attendant to ask where they kept the Otamatones. He pointed me to an aisle, but mentioned they might be sold out. I still couldn't find any, and so I gave up on Yodobashi.
The second store I tried was BIC Camera Yurakucho, which is basically the exact same thing as Yodobashi, just 3 km south.
It was easier finding a non-stressed store attendant this time, but I was told that they were also sold out. It was then I realized that I might be arriving in Japan a year too late to have any chance of finding Otamatone stocked on store shelves. Thoroughly defeated, I went back to the capsule hotel for the night.
But now that I have an internet connection again, it seems that instead of lacking the popularity to be stocked on store shelves, as I had thought after visiting BIC Camera, they may be too popular to be kept in stock for long. A video released only 5 months ago demonstrates a new variety of Otamatone that was just released (Otamatone Techno). I find it hard to believe that they would expend the effort to design a new Otamatone a year after the original was revealed only to run out of the demand to sell them in stores five months later! And so my hunt for the Otamatone continues...
I end this post with my favorite of all Otamatone videos, a stupidly beautiful rendering of Schubert's Ave Maria.
I didn't have anything specific on my agenda, so I decided to simply walk around to get a feel for Tokyo (at least, the minuscule portion within walking distance). Less than a minute walk from my capsule hotel is a view of the Sumida River, Asahi Beer Headquarters, and Tokyo SkyTree.
I thought that maybe the golden tadpole building signified a national museum, but nope, just beer headquarters
I walked across the river and into Sumida Park, which is particularly beautiful in the sleepy, early spring light and with the wind snowing sakura around you.
My photos don't do it justice.
While walking through Sumida City I came across a troop of young Japanese men that were singing in unison and marching around a flag. I had no idea what they were doing, but it made the walk a bit more lively.
Leaving Sumida City
After crossing a different bridge onto the side of the river I had originally started my journey on, I decided to stop at a café along the waterfront. The second-floor café was empty when I walked in except for an old Japanese lady. After catching her attention I was eventually able to communicate that I wanted a black tea. Partway through my tea and biscuits someone who looked like she could be the old Japanese lady's daughter came out and told me her mom (?) would like to sing an old Japanese song for me. I acquiesced and the older lady came out and sang a quaint little tune. Applauding her, I brought up a map on my phone and showed her all the places I'd been so far. In return she brought me her laminated scrapbook of photos of the SkyTree being built and talked me through each page in Japanese. I had no idea what she was saying, and I'm sure she had no idea what I was telling her, but it was just another one of those interactions that sometimes occur when two unlikely people meet!
From the café I walked down Asakusa Dori, the street above the Ginza Line, figuring that eventually I would run into something interesting.
I did eventually run into a series of indoor and outdoor shopping complexes that hug Ueno Park. I was even able to find a book store that sells Nikoli puzzle books! Nikoli is the company that brought us Sudoku as we know it today, but they have many other language-agnostic logic type puzzles.
Now I just need to find an Otomatone and my time in Japan will be complete.
Where are you, Otamatone?
I spent the rest of the night into early next morning solving puzzles. They're a bit addicting!
Taking the shinkansen from Osaka to Tokyo was quite a process. The ticket machine I bought my tickets from didn't take cash, obviating the ¥20,000 I had withdrawn from an ATM just moments before, so I had to pay with card. The ticket (actually multiple slips of paper, some of them being receipts) it spits out is almost entirely in Japanese and I had to ask a man at the information desk what my track number was. Once I was on the train itself, I was kicked out of my seat after one stop because I had bought a non-reserved seat ticket, and although the carriage I had boarded lacked a "reserved" sign on the outside my ticket was only good for a seat in cars 1 through 3, according to the fare attendant I queried. But eventually I found my seat, and before I was kicked out I was able to get this video of our train leaving Osaka from a window seat!
Once in Tokyo I realized I had no internet connectivity and had not yet downloaded the offline map for Tokyo Ward, so all I had to go off of to find the capsule hotel I had booked were the instructions in the cached email. They told me to go to Asakusa Station, take exit A5, and walk left for a minute. After failing to find Asakusa station on the transit map, finding a similarly named Asakusabashi station instead, tapping onto the wrong line, transferring to the correct line after getting my previous tap on nullified by a fare attendant, getting off too early, and finding Asakusa Station on the line map while trying to reorient myself, I finally emerged from exit A5 and was able to find my accommodation squeezed between a salon and a restaurant.
Once settled in, I roamed the streets for food (not difficult to find, but there's so many choices!) before returning to sleep for the night.
The next three days I took a break from typical travel activities. That's not to say I wasn't still trying to familiarize myself with Japan or its culture! I learned how to play go and began researching and organizing my plans for the Tokyo segment of my Japan trip. For the most part, the Osaka area continued its trend of overcast weather and highs near 15 degrees Celsius, so I wasn't missing out on any pleasant outdoor strolls.
I may have inadvertently taken a pleasant stroll at some point
Since I didn't do much in the way of travel activities during this period I'll talk about my observations of Japan so far. Residential units are small. Each floor of a single family home is maybe 400-500 square feet. Even doorways within the hostel are too small to walk through without ducking my head. Roads in the neighborhood my hostel resides within are only wide enough for one American made car (or maybe two slim model cars like the ones popular here).
One of my favorite things about Japan are the super cozy restaurants. They're usually built like old American diners and can seat a bit over a dozen people. The interior is often decorated nicely and most of the time you are steps away from the proportionally small kitchen. My first night here, me and some other guests had drinks at a pub that was the size of a sauna. But this doesn't mean everyone is crammed together or that service is slow. Because restaurants are so small, they're also extremely numerous -- and people usually spread out between them rather than be crushed inside any single one of them. Contrast this with the US where there's often a few restaurants that are overwhelmingly popular at certain times of the day and/or on certain days of the week so that -- while larger in space -- they feel more cramped. Smaller restaurants also mean your server is physically closer to you and doesn't waste as much time going back and forth delivering orders to the kitchen or bringing out food for other customers.
As for transportation, most people get around by foot, bike, and metro.
I learned that the hostel I am staying in is actually in one of the "seediest" parts of Osaka but, knowing that, it's almost laughably safe at night. Streets are nearly always empty by 11. Nobody is on the streets selling drugs, drinking, or otherwise causing a disruption late at night. While the streets of the nearby entertainment pavilions are noticeably worn, they're also inexorably clean. Osaka's red light district is a five minute walk south from the hostel, but I never visited the area.
The drinking and smoking age in Japan is 20 years old, but vending machines on the streets will sell you cans of beer for less than ¥200, or packs of cigarettes, without any need to verify your ID. "Casual Wine" is also marketed and sold at convenience stores. About ¥200 will get you a small (I think 150ml) plastic wine bottle to go with your on-the-go meal. The really casual wine that you can get in small plastic bottles usually has a lower alcohol content -- between 8 and 12 percent -- than regular, glass bottle wine so you can drink during the day without actually day drinking. Sodas with 5 to 9 percent alcohol content are also fairly common in convenience stores.
Osaka isn't actually very touristy, contrary to what I'd learned to believe from watching films before coming to Japan. But with prices for dorm rooms in nearby Kyoto over ¥6000 this time of the year, I can see why ¥1500 a night in Osaka and a two hour, ¥1000 round trip to Kyoto instead would be appealing. Osaka is also centrally located with respect to other cities on the tourist circuit in the Kansai region, and is the closest major city to the two international airports in the prefecture.
On my last day in Osaka the sun finally decided to show its face and made me a little bit regretful that I was leaving so soon to spend the last eight days of my Japan trip in Tokyo.
I had half a mind to spend another day at a cafe, but my friend convinced me that today would be the last rain-free day for a while and I should go to Kyoto. I knew Kyoto was a popular city to visit in Japan, but didn't know anything specific that was popular to do there. Being cherry blossom season, I had Google direct me to the largest, most central park. The ride from Tennoji to Gion-Shoji takes about an hour and costs ¥500 or so.
I had originally been aiming to go to Maruyama Park to the east of the station, but the river and sakura were so pretty that I began walking south near the shoreline instead.
The least overcast day to date during my time in Japan
A small park near the river
Looking north
From the map I had, it looked like I had walked to the southernmost end of Maruyama Park, but in reality I had walked to a whole new area that contained a number of Buddhist temples.
It looked as if Kiyomizu-dera was my ultimate destination, but to get there I had to cut through a cemetery. The tombstones in a Japanese cemetery are much like the houses many Japanese live in: small, cute, and really close together.
Climbing the path by the cemetery leads you to Kiyomizu-dera, which I guess is an iconic Buddhist temple, but to my naive eyes it was just a fancy orange building. The place was flooded with both tourists and locals.
Looking east towards Kiyomizu-dera
Looking west, down towards Kyoto
Past the temple there's a walking path. Tickets cost ¥400. I thought the path wrapped around a large portion of the park, but if it did I wasn't able to find out. At 17:00 they close a path that looks like it fit the description, and I had arrived 10 minutes too late. So I got about 5% of what I thought I was getting with my ticket, but it wasn't an all-together terrible 5%.
View from the "exclusive" walking path
I might have stuck around Kyoto for nighttime festivities, but the temperature had already dropped below 15 degrees and I wanted nothing more than to take the express train to Osaka and heat up a bowl of instant ramen noodles back at the hostel.
I walked with some other hostel guests to nearby Den Den Town, a shopping district known for its toys and anime.
Other than seeing all the weird Japanese toys, I was hoping to find a shop that sells Otamatone, a toy musical instrument that can be played like the slide mechanism on a trombone, usually for humorous effect.
Not Den Den Town, but a nearby shopping area called Ebisuhigashi
We first stopped at a peculiarity that has become increasingly popular in Japan and culturally related areas. A maid café is a type of cosplay restaurant that was originally meant to appeal to the otaku culture in Japan. Waitresses dress up in maid costumes and treat customers more akin to masters and mistresses in a private home rather than run of the mill patrons. I'd never heard of maid cafes before today, and after researching them on the internet I see now what fascinating, strange places they can be. Some offer spoon-feeding services, or allow you to pay for a massage (as long as you keep all your clothes on). One lets you pay ¥2500 to play a game where you must drink a vile concoction one of the maids cooks up, or else be slapped on the face in front of the whole room. Other maid cafes play a tsundere theme, where the maid who serves you will act cold and hostile while serving you but might begin to cry when you get up to leave.
The maid café we visited was nothing too extreme. The interior was decorated in a Victorian style, anime played on a TV on the wall, and to summon your maid you're supposed to ring a small bell. The toilets have a "flushing sound" button (which I've since learned is common to most Japanese toilets, not just maid cafes) that is meant to obscure any bodily sounds you don't want others to hear. Photography was strictly prohibited.
After the maid cafe we explored the huge number of toy, video game, and sex shops that littered Den Den Town. The toy stores stocked toys more in the "Hobby Lobby" sense than the "Toys R Us" sense, and models of trains, planes, cars, boats, anime characters, and guns abounded.
YES, GUNS. Notice the "Kids Land" signs indicating the name of the store next to each gun.
Guns are effectively illegal to own in Japan, but that doesn't stop air gun models from being popular enough to sell. The sex shops were bizarrely frequent, and some were more than three stories tall. In addition to regular pornographic videos, they sold sex toys, hentai, or pornography based computer games. Sections of stores containing pornographic material were restricted from those below 18 years of age, but ground floor displays were often populated with large collections of soft-core pornographic videos containing footage of a bodacious Japanese woman giving platonic massages. And that's not all they sell. I even bought some relatively cheap (non-pornographic) socks that I'd found while perusing the ground floor of one such store.
I was more interested in searching for Otamatone in the toy stores than exploring the Japanese sex industry, of course, but I was governed in part by the whims of the guests I had come with. Unfortunately, the toy stores were more interested in selling models than actual toys (in the American sense of the word "toy") and I wasn't able to find what I was looking for before we walked back to the hostel for the night.
Today was supposed to be about Osakaichiritsu Central Library, but when I arrived at the library I found there was no free WiFi provided, despite being one of the two libraries funded by the Osaka prefectural government (i.e., it was no small town library!). The library itself, though large, wasn't particularly impressive, so I went out in search of a cafe. I really did try to find a cafe that wasn't Starbucks, but all the cafes I passed made no promises as to whether WiFi was provided and I didn't feel like taking my chances after being stood up by the public library. I did try to enter one cafe that looked promising, located on the second floor of a building. But I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to enter the building in the first place and gave up.
The residential street of my current hostel, Peace House Showa
It's days like these when I can especially empathize with tourists that travel to far away destinations just to get their coffee at Starbucks. Everything about major chains like McDonalds and Starbucks is just so predictable. You know exactly how to get into the store, where the menu is located, approximate price, if the staff speak English, whether there's free WiFi and comfy, plentiful seating, etc. When you've already spent your day navigating metro systems and streets that are completely foreign to you and trying to interpret symbols and photos on signs written in a mysterious language it can be a huge relief to walk into a place that feels familiar.
A small park I waked by while wandering the streets
The Starbucks I ended up at had large front windows that were perfect for people watching. It was nice to take a break from sightseeing for a day.
Japan is cold. The high hasn't been above 18 Celsius the past few days. I'd only packed two pairs of pants, but really didn't feel like wearing either my sweats or my perpetually dirty beige pants, so I walked to the shopping center by Tennoji Station to buy some black jeans.
Clothing in Japan is expensive. Possibly even more expensive than clothing in America. I only wanted to spend about 30 USD, but jeans were constantly priced ¥5000+ (45+ USD) -- even at the less ostentatious stores. I found a pair I liked for ¥3600, but they didn't fit, so I bought one size up. But when I was rung up at the register, I realized that the larger size was actually priced nearly ¥2000 more! At that point I was so close to ending my grueling search for a measly pair of jeans that grudgingly paid up and trudged back to the hostel. I wanted to buy socks, too, but those had even more ludicrous prices (¥1000 for a single pair).
These electronic dictionary / educational toy computers are popular here
After convenience store sushi for lunch I decided to go look for some cherry blossoms. I took the metro to a decently sized park I had picked from Google Maps.
I hadn't realized that Osaka Castle was located in the same area. It was too late in the day to see the inside of the castle, but I strolled around the park nonetheless, taking in the abundant sakura (cherry blossoms) and groups partaking in hanami (flower viewing).
