- “She endures the cake and the pizza for the boyfriend”
- “Sadly to the you, there is no jollity but has a smack of foley”
- “100% growth potential, where I grow 100% a day”
- And my personal favourite: “Madonna breaks free of love all guys!! Please help her!” I actually found this one so funny I ended up buying it!
We arrived in Osaka around 3 or 4pm on Wednesday the 20th of August (my birthday). We decided we wouldn’t do any more sightseeing that day and would just have fun! We first went to the Hep Five Ferris Wheel, which is a Ferris wheel attached to the 8th floor of a shopping mall. You can see a view of the whole city while riding it.
We then walked around the games and arcade area of the mall and went on the most amazing virtual reality ride called Wild River Splash. It’s a ride where you sit in a boat with a screen in front, and the boat tips and sways as if it were going down waterfalls. The ride also splashes water at the riders as it goes through wavy areas. We were on the ride with about 8 other Japanese, and we were sitting at the back. We spent the entire ride screaming and laughing so hard we were all crying, while the other riders sat bored, while their heads bobbed back and forth with the movements of the ride. By the end of the ride, all the Japanese riders were laughing at us!
We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and checking out the Japanese fashions.
We ended the night with a sushi dinner celebration. All in all it was a very memorable and awesome 22nd birthday celebration!
We woke up late the next morning and decided we wanted an easy day. No major sightseeing. The weather was looking a bit gloomy, so we thought it would be the perfect day for shopping!
We headed down to the Shinsaibashi and Namba areas. These two areas contain street after street of covered, open shops. Basically they are walking streets with a cover. You can see from the photo that there were hundreds of people there!
We all bought a few things, but not many though, some of the Japanese fashions are too extreme for us! They wear very interesting clothing here, and actually a lot of it contains words and phrases in English. We have started reading everyone’s shirts as they walk by because the English is hilarious, and full of spelling and grammar mistakes, and most of them don’t actually make sense.
Here is a collection of a few of our favourites:
Ken explained that most Japanese are fascinated by Americans, and think they are so cool! So they like wearing clothing with English writing on it, but unfortunately they must not understand what it says, or they probably wouldn’t be wearing it! Some of it is a bit sad though. Caelan has a little girl student, who owns a shirt that says “Stick it in me” with a photo of a happy face on it. I truly hope she never wears that shirt again, especially after she was told what its meaning was!
One experience we did not enjoy while shopping was their store policies. Stores have change rooms, but they wouldn’t let us try the clothing on. We couldn’t figure out if it was because we were foreigners, or if this rule applied to everyone. But since we saw Japanese ladies trying clothing on, we concluded that this was a classic example of foreigners being discriminated against and it brought back memories of the nightmares we had trying to find hotels in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Iwakuni.
But we did not let this ruin our fun!
We ate dinner at a very good Indian restaurant next to Dohtombori, which is an area where all the buildings are covered in lights. When we left the restaurant, we could see all the cool lights on the buildings in the area! They were in different shapes and designs.
We then headed to a bowling alley. The registration area was pretty cool, you had to rent shoes from a machine! You pressed a button for your shoe size, and a pair of shoes in your size came out at the bottom! Just like a pop or candy machine!
We spent the next day exploring the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan. It’s a really cool aquarium with so many different types of creatures! They had Sea Otters, Sea Lions, Penguins, Whale Sharks, Manta Rays, Sting Rays, Giant Spider Crabs and many different types of Jelly Fish.
One of the most exciting things at the Aquarium wasn’t the fish or sea creatures, it was Jodi Foster!! She was there with her 2 sons!! She was dressed very casually, probably so she wouldn’t stand out of the crowd. The problem was that she was pushing her way through people, and was rushing through the aquarium, which actually caused a larger scene, and was ultimately how we realized it was her!! Unfortunately we did not take a photo (actually I tried to take one, but I only got the back of her head, so I deleted it), but it made us all very excited!
We went for dinner at a Thai restaurant, and then went out for a night on the town! We looked up a bunch of clubs in Osaka, and thought we would go to the one with the funniest sounding name: Soul Fucktry. Our new friend Romain from the hostel in Kobe joined us for the night and brought two other guys who were staying at his hostel, one from Montreal and another from Italy.
We spent the night dancing and having a great time! We wanted to celebrate the end of our cross country backpacking tour!! Ken had to return to work, so the remainder of our time in Japan would be spent touring around just the girls (Me, Steph and Fieke).
We didn’t book a hostel for that night because we needed to be on the train at 6am the next morning and thought it would be a waste of money to pay for 1 or 2 hours of sleep. So we spent the night at the club, and then around 4am we went out for breakfast. At 5am when the subway opened we took the train to the central Osaka station, and waited for our 6am train back to Ken’s house.
The 6 hours from Osaka to Ken’s house was the longest 6 hours of our entire trip! We could barely keep our eyes open, and we were so weak from exhaustion. When we finally arrived at Ken’s house we went directly to bed!
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