Oh!saka

Listening to: Such Great Heights cover by The Shins
Currently drinking: Astoria instant coffee

Hello everyone,
I'm back! Well, actually I got back yesterday, but decided that I was way too tired to take on the daunting task of writing about my weekend trip to Osaka. So now, after a solid fourteen hours of sleep, I feel marginally confident enough in my ability to retell the tale of a fantastic weekend filled with a plethora of gut-wrenching moments filled emotional twists and turns.

First, let me give you the players in this grand scheme: Aussie Erin (aka Workout Babe), Crazy Katy (also known as Cincinnati Katy or CrayKay p.s. she's crazy awesome not crazy bad), Sir Phillip the Great, the Frenchies,  and...me.

The whole gang from left to right: Me, CrayKay, Aussi Erin
Sir Phillip, and the Frenchies (Allison and Bertie)

Our departing date was set for Friday. Everyone was excited and ready to get out of the little bubble that is I-House. We all went to classes as usual, came home, packed and got ready, and then set out for Nagoya Station. We booked this private bus through Willer Express, so we were looking forward to three hours of wonderfully luxurious travel that included: comfy seats, video game playing, movie watching, and sleep.

The bus was pink and had little tv's for every seat!

Most of the ride was pretty dull, though I did pick up an extra cell phone charm at the bathroom stop, but it was comfy and nice, and I slept the entire time. It was pretty dark when we got there, so we couldn't see how huge Osaka actually was. We all really just wanted to get to our hostel put our stuff down, but first we had to find the godforsaken place. Our hostel, Hotel Taiyo, was a couple stops away, so we hopped on the subway and got off in probably the seediest part of Osaka. This part of town smelled like pee and nasty sewage and was rampant with homeless people, and it's not like I'm unused to bums, but you just get kind of used to everything being sparkling clean in Japan. We had a general idea of where we were going, and both myself and CrayKay knew how to ask for directions in Japanese, but it still took us about a half an hour to find the damned place that ended up being only two blocks away. While en route, Aussie Erin got asked "how much" by a Japanese business man and Katy got offered a hot dog by some creepy old guy when asking for directions. Let's just say, we were all relieved when Erin finally found another foreigner with a GPS cell phone who could show us the place we'd been circling for twenty minutes.

Whew! Ok so we finally got to our hostel and met up with Sir Phillip, who had been at another hostel in Kyoto for the week, checked in, and went to our respective rooms before heading out to karaoke.

The door was only 2 inches taller than Katy,
making it a grand total of 5'8" 

Tiny room, smells weird, great price? I'm ok with that...

After a bit of  a rest, we headed out to have some good old fashioned Japanese fun! Sir Phillip found this wonderful little hold-in-the wall karaoke place that was relatively cheap and had an insane amount of english songs.

Tiny, cramped, bright pink, and amazing!

Gettin our sing on

The giant book of songs

The Frenchies being cool and French 

The boys

This was my first time doing karaoke, and I was still sick so I had to subject everyone to my dying cat voice, but it was still a blast and I definitely want to do more of it! By the end of the night we were all pretty tired, mildly drunk, and quite happy. It was time to sleep and rest up for the big day we had planned for Saturday.

Ok, so Saturday was probably the best day I've had in Japan so far. We slept in, which was nice because the day before was so tiring, walked around the neighborhood for a bit, and then met up with Erin and Phil so we could go to the main shopping area, Namba, for lunch and to explore.

Some random idols at a photoshoot in the middle of
the shopping district

Walking around Namba made me realize what a small town girl I am. I mean, I thought Nagoya was huge compared to Seattle, but Osaka is just ginormous! There are people everywhere, and surprisingly, they are all incredibly diverse. There are also a lot of foreigners there, much more so than Nagoya, so the stares, though still many, were slightly less lingering. Most of the day was spent shopping and gawking at all the super intense advertising (talk about mass media). We found a Shaky's Pizza for lunch that had an all you can eat buffet for pretty cheap. I'm gonna take a second to brag about the seven pieces that I ate, even though the slices were pretty small.... I also found a giant, four-story Starbucks that I ended up buying an Osaka traveler's mug from (gotta love it)!

Every story was filled to the brim!

Pretty sweet right?

Over the course of the day, I found myself using increasingly more Japanese. I know I've talked about baby steps before, and I am really happy to say that I'm getting more confident in my ability to communicate as well as get around, although my Nihongo teacher might beg to differ...

Anyway, later that night we all met up with some of Sir Phillip's friends from Canada. It was apparently one of their friend's birthday, and so we made plans to go to the nightclub Pure, but first we wanted dinner. One of the rarest types of food in Japan is Mexican food, and one of the friends knew where an "authentic" restaurant was. Obviously, I wanted to go, I mean I was raised on Mexican food...come on. And fortunately, it really did live up to its hype!

It was decorated just like Azteca *sniff*

I think this was the first restaurant that I've eaten at in Japan and actually felt full...ohhh it was so good. It wasn't anything compared to back home, but it beat any "Mexican" restaurant around Nagoya that's for sure.

As for the nightclub, I don't have any pictures because I didn't want to bring my camera for fear of losing it, but I do have quite a story for you! First of all, the whole aura about the place was very secretive (later I found out that nightclubs/dancing in Osaka are completely illegal). We had to wait in line several stores away from the club so there wasn't a huge group of people in front of the place, we either had to have our gaijin card or our passport in order to get in (usually it just takes a student id), and when we finally got in, we had to go through several doors and be escorted by multiple security guards. I kind of felt like James Bond entering some top secret military facility, all just to go dancing jeez o.0

Was it worth it? All in all, yes. The place was all you can drink, and pretty cheap for ladies, but at first nothing really fun was going on. It was jam packed with foreigners from all over the world as well as some locals (we call them gaijin hunters), so we pushed our way to the bar for our first round of drinks and tried to find some seats. Luckily, there was this tiny little grotto-esque area where we shoved ourselves into. CrayKay and Aussie Erin left after a bit, but the Frenchies and I stayed and talked with some random local guy for a while. Eventually I got smoked out and left to grab more drinks/find my friends, and by that time the dance floor was super packed. I decided it was the perfect time for gettin my groove on and proceeded to grab Katie and Erin and head onto the floor. One thing you should be warned of if you ever go to a foreign bar is that everyone is looking for some action, so you have to be incredibly selective about who you dance with. It was so fun though, me, Erin, Phil, and Katie got our serious dance on.  I remembered not to wear heels this time, so I had no chance of falling over, and so steadily sweated off the nights dinner. I got pretty tired after a while though and decided to head back up to the bar when I happened to see some people in a window upstairs. I had no idea how they had gotten up there because there wasn't a visible staircase, but I stared for a while and noticed they were actually waving at me and telling me to come up! At first I was a little hesitant, seeing as I could be abducted by some yakuza or sold to some rich guy, but then I thought, "Why not? I'm in Japan right?" So, I headed to the back and found that the VIP room was actually hidden behind a false staircase, and up I went. The upstairs room was super quiet and I was really nervous at first, but then saw the group of people that had waved me up and headed over. I was shocked to find out that the two girls that were with the one, super rich, guy had no idea who he was. It actually ended up being pretty pleasant because it was a lot quieter upstairs, I got a lot of free drinks, and I got to sit and try out my Japanese for about an hour and a half with one of the girls. After a while, the girls decided to leave and I felt that was my cue to exit as well, so I headed back down into the masses of sweaty people and made my way back out onto the dance floor. After a lot of dancing, and a lot of drama to do with some  more than aggressive foreigners, I felt drunkenly confident enough to barge my way to the pool table and kick some ass... which I did, until I scratched on the eight ball. That's what I get for being drunk and not pulling back enough with the cue dammit. It was just after that, Phil found me and told me CrayKay was falling over and that we should probably head out, so we met up in the locker room and grabbed our stuff. Unfortunately, only four of the six of us made it out because Sir Phillip lost his camera, so it was up to me (the trip's translator wtf??) to get us home. It took some time to flag down a cab, but thankfully we had the hotel's address on Katie's phone and we made it back relatively intact. The time? Six in the morning. We had been partying for seven hours straight, plus dinner, and shopping before that. Needless to say, I'm done for a while.

Post Pure, still drunk

Sunday morning we had to check out of the hotel by ten o'clock, no later, and seeing as I was the only one not still drunk and/or hungover, it was up to me to be the bitch and make sure everyone was up and ready to leave. It took some time, but we eventually all made it out the door and back to the main station in Umeda. We had time to spare and decided to grab the most delicious post-party food on the planet, McDonalds, but this is where things started to go horribly wrong. Every time I asked for directions, I was told it was too hard to explain...okayyy. So then, we finally found a lady who told it was across the street in the other underground station, and trekked over there in search of our delicious prey. After about an hour of searching, we found it, got our food, and had a half an hour to get back to the spot and wait for our bus. Plenty of time right? Wrong. The spot that we were told the bus would be at was totally, completely wrong. Alright, don't panic. We asked for directions again, and were told to go back to where we found the McDonalds, wtf? Don't panic. We went back that way and found a few busses, but couldn't see the blaring yellow Willer flag, so we asked around again. Don't Panic! Fifteen minutes to go, still no bus, so I asked around again, and was told there was no Willer Express. DON'T PANIC! By this time we decided no one there could help us and started looking for the bus ourselves. We actually ended up finding the spot that we were dropped off at, but no damned pink bus. With only minutes left to spare, we desperately asked around for the bus, yet nobody seemed to know what we were talking about...why hadn't we just googled it in the lobby that morning!? Finally, the time we had to grab the bus passed. Poor Allison had been wearing heels all day and was dying, we were all dying really, we only wanted to get home. Eventually the executive decision was made to forgo looking for the bus anymore, seeing as we missed it, and shell out the extra thirty bucks to buy a train home. We hobbled dejectedly back to the main station with our luggage and, with the help of a very nice older Japanese man, found the right train back to Nagoya. Three hours later, we were home, exhausted, but home. I ran to my room, dropped all my luggage, and after a bit of internet surfing, passed out for the next fourteen hours.

Well, that's the story. What did I learn from this weekend? Look things up on Google maps before you go. The whole "it's all just an adventure...take it in stride" thing, sucks. Prepare yourself, at least when it comes to knowing how to get around, and you will have a lot more fun. Everything else, leave up to chance. Have fun as it comes and don't get too concerned with keeping a schedule because adventures will just happen naturally. I really do want to go back to Osaka and explore more of the city, and maybe the castle, next time, but I will be absolutely, positively sure I know where the bus back is!

Hopefully I didn't bore you too much! Thanks for reading and <3 you lattes!