Osaka Osaka Osaka
Yesterday we did a big walk around Osaka, from our hotel, up past Tennoji Park, and through Shin-Sekai to Namba. The first thing you notice around is how incredibly dense the city is. Every street and alley is packed with shops. Noodle bars, Cafes, and Pachinko. There are pachinko places just everywhere, it’s crazy. Most of the pachinko places have arcades too, and seem to have a bunch of people in there pretty much all the time. The arcade games are about 50円 or 100円 to play, which is fairly cheap.
The pachinko places are usually enormous multi-floor buildings with music and noise blasting out of them, as well has heaps of huge signs out the front, just hanging everywhere. There are alot of people in there playing Mahjongg, and I even saw some brain-age like games there. One of the places had a machine with the original Super Mario Bros playing, so cool. :D
Shinsaibashi was pretty busy, and with lots of more expensive and larger stores. There were a few big department stores with about 15 floors, just enormous. We stopped around there to have a bite to eat; Japanese people consider it rude to eat in public, so you don’t really eat and drink while walking down the street like you would in Australia. The rubbish bins are all seperated by different waste types, which is a bit difficult to figure out. They seemed to be paired, one for bottles and one for something else, I couldn’t read what it was though.
We caught a train from there up to Osaka station. There was a train-station attendant there who was very helpful, explained to us how the train/subway system works. It’s fairly simple once you figure it out. There are just large maps above the ticket machines with a price next to each station on the map. You just dump some money into it and specify the fare you want and then it prints the ticket. Too easy. The fares range from about 200円 to about 300円 for the subway.
When we got to Osaka station we headed out looking for the Yodabashi Camera store. It’s about 10 floors high and just enormous. It has every piece of electronic equipment you can imagine, as well as some restaurants up the top. We grabbed some power adaptor cables and stuff for laptops and DS so we could charge them, the conversations asking staff about this stuff was a little difficult, but we got what we needed without too much trouble.
After that we just caught a train back and rested in the hotel a while, it was a pretty tiring day trip. So that was the first big day, I’ll try and write more about what we do today and put up some photos soon too.