Monday, April 12, 2010

Japan Day 5













On day five we got a real rain shower. Tim and I thought ahead and brought rain jackets but Patrick was stuck getting wet in the rain. Unfortunately, I didn’t get many pictures on day 5. My camera isn’t water resistant in the least, so I didn’t want to damage it. We checked out of the inn around 9:30am and headed into the central station area of Nagoya. Here we grabbed breakfast at Mister Donut. It was amazing! There were all sorts of different varieties of donuts, freshly baked. I tried a pretzel type donut and a chocolate one. Both were delicious. The coffee was pretty good, but I'm still missing Tim Horton's for some reason.

After the amazing Mister Donut experience, we caught the bullet train to Osaka. It was a short trip this time, only about 40 minutes. We arrived in Osaka and deposited our backpacks in some coin lockers at the station. We then started wandering around and seeing what we could find. Since it was still raining pretty hard, we stuck around the station for the first couple of hours. Luckily, there were a few nice shops and lots of different restaurants. We stopped in this awesome bookstore and we were completely amazed by the amount of anime and video game related magazines. We're all really geeky, so it was very tempting for us to buy a bunch of different stuff. However, Tim and I each ended up buying a magazine each. Hopefully, the extra weight won't be too much of a hinderance during the rest of our travels.

We were all getting hungry again, so we started looking for a place to eat. Tim and I were both wanted to get curry, but Patrick doesn't like curry, so we split up. We found this awesome tonkatsu (specialising in pork) restaurant near the east gate of the station and had fried pork with rice and curry. Delicious! It was also a bonus that it happened to be their lunch special. Patrick went and got some sushi and we all met up afterward. Since we had seen about all of what the station had to offer, we started wandering around Osaka to see what we could find. After a bit of aimless wandering, we started exploring some kind of shady looking back streets. We could tell they were shady since there were maid cafes and hostess clubs everywhere.

Suddenly, Tim went down an alley to our left and that's when we saw the Sega arcade. We spent our next couple of hours here wasting our money, but it was a blast. I was trying my luck at a UFO catcher type game and almost had the item I wanted, but then I gave up. Tim tried once and got it. Damn him! It was pretty cool, though. I then spent the last of my change on a game card for Shining Force Cross. It's kind of an interesting online arcade RPG. All of your game data gets saved to the card. I didn't realize that the game was part touch screen, though, and couldn't figure out how to enter my name. Tim walked by and pressed the screen for me, so my character ended up being 'NO NAME'. =P

Since it was just about time for the next place to do check it, we went back to the station and grabbed our bags. We then began following the directions to the Shin-Osaka Youth Hostel from the Lonely Planet guide. After a five minute walk, we found it. It was really, really nice. A new building with large rooms that incorporate the modern and contemporary Japanese styles. The staff were very nice and accomodating. Over all, just a really nice facility.

Being very exhausted, we spent the rest of the night settling in at the hostel. We made one last adventure out in the rain to get some food from a convenience store. We ended up getting absolutely soaked! Fortunately, the weather forecast was predicting it to clear up by tomorrow.

2 comments:

  1. You guys didn't check out a maid cafe or hostess club? SON, I AM DISAPPOINT.

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  2. The arcade.....it's beautiful -wipes tear from eye-

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