Welcome to Osaka
Last night we arrived in Osaka, about 8pm. Getting out of immigration and customs was a pretty painless process. The airport was fairly quiet and coming outside it was a nice, cool, 4C. Yay! After a few warm and humid nights in Brisbane this was a welcome change.
Getting a train ticket was fairly painless, and we went to wait at the train-line. There was an awesome futuristic looking train with chairs that rearranged themself to cater for different train capacities. So cool.
We caught a train on the Nankai line to Shin-Imamiya station. It was pretty cold once we got off there. It was about 9pm and the streets were still fairly busy with people at this time. There wasn’t really that much vehicle traffic around though. The first suprising thing was the sheer number of vending machines. Wow, they’re just literally everywhere. About every 30 metres you would find a couple of them; drinks, snacks, and cigarettes.
While we were taking a photo of some vending machines, we saw a guy stop and vomit for a minute and then continue strolling down the street as normal. Exciting nightlife indeed.
After being a little lost, a friendly old guy walking his dog gave us directions to the hotel and half-followed us as we failed to follow them properly a couple of times. People here seem really friendly and helpful! Despite the hotel being advertised as having english speaking staff, it didn’t seem that way in reality. The conversations were pretty basic though, and we got up to our room and got ready to go get some food.
There were alot of small food shops and bars still open, that was pretty cool, and lots of nice looking food. Everything seemed fairly cheap. We found our way to a スーパ (supermarket) and having no idea what most of the stuff there was, we grabbed some water and sake and a beer; and something that looked like soft bread-like snacks, which turned out to be rice crackers of some sort, pretty tasty though! There was no bread or muesli or anything in sight. It’s definitely going to be time to figure out a new diet here. It’s so hard to tell what is healthy and what isn’t. The next week will be more eating out than I’ve done in the rest of my life added up.
We wandered back and grabbed some meal from a store on the street, some fried rice and fish stuff.. pretty tasty, but not really good quality stuff. That was pretty cheap too.
That is about the end of the first evening, I’ll write about the second day soon, we went on a long walk around and caught a few trains and went to a giant mega store. Fun times!