Osaka Trip

Shinkansen (bullet train) tickets are expensive. They're a little cheaper if you buy them a few months in advance, but not a whole lot. As it was, on the way out Zhemin and I bought them in Shibuya station the day before we needed them for about 13000 yen each, one-way. Ouch.
On the morning of the 24th, Mina, Zhemin and I set off to Tokyo station (the first time I'd ever stopped there, actually - I really need to see more of inner/old Tokyo). From there we got on the Shinkansen. I was surprised by how regular they were - about every half hour or so. We had unreserved seats, so we just got on the first one that left after we got there. Zhemin sat a row ahead of Mina and I, to better take pictures out the window (his main objective of the trip seemed to be, as the trip went on, to take photos).
It's always a bit of a trip leaving Tokyo. Seeing small farms out the window can be way more exciting than I ever thought after a month in the city. Still, it's funny how different Japan is from the US in terms of geography and habitation. Though there were yes, some farms, almost all the space that wasn't mountains was fairly densely developed. A small town in Japan is, if I can manage to put my old American goggles on, really generally not that small. The difference is that a four-story building stands out out there in the "country," but the fact remains that there's hardly a square foot undeveloped for miles, and the town stretches continuously a long, long way wherever the ground is reasonable level.
Shinkansen, though expensive, as I said, is a really nice way to travel. It's fast. If the time it takes to get through an airport in Japan is anything like int he US, probably as fast as flying for Tokyo to Osaka, at around two and a half hours. Unlike in planes, however, the seats are large and comfortable, there's plenty of leg room, and there's often interesting scenery to see out the window. I was actually a little sad when we got to our destination so quickly; I'd been enjoying the ride, playing word games with Mina, chatting, watching the changing scenery, and reading A Wild Sheep Chase for my Japanese novels class. I saw from the window for a brief moment Kyoto (I'll be back!), the coast and ocean, many (sort of) small towns, the black interiors of many tunnels, and as we went through the mountains even some half-melted snow hanging on in the shadows, the first snow I'd seen for the year.

When we got to Shin-Osaka station, we realized that we hadn't written down the name of the station near our hotel, though we had a decent idea of where it was. Mina phoned someone at the dorm (Trang, maybe?), who kindly looked it up and told us, and we were on our way. After an encounter with a cantankerous old taxi driver, we arrived at the hotel and successfully checked in (Zhemin using his passport, since, in defiance of the risk of getting deported at any moment, he still hasn't gotten his state-issued alien registration ID).
I had talked Zhemin into getting a cheaper hotel than he'd originally set his sights on, so I was a little worried that if it weren't nice I'd be somewhat responsible. It wasn't the newest or shiniest building, but the room was actually quite nice. At first I was excited by it, even. The concept of sleeping on a mattress after almost three months of sleeping on a pitifully thin economy futon (basically the equivalent of laying a thick quilt over a board and sleeping on that) was especially mouth-watering. But soon it was actually slightly depressing how much more spacious the room was than my dorm room. Open floor space, a bathroom so big you don't have to lean over the toilet when showering (a bathroom that is not, the entire room, the shower stall itself, for that matter), a decent heater, a mini-kitchen with a more than two square feet of stage space, and a real balcony overlooking the concrete office building next door. These are the things I only dream of back in the dorm.

We soon went out again, though it was already dark. We ate dinner at a kind of unremarkable little diner that served mostly Chinese food and was decorated with American flags and old Beatles paraphernalia. From there we walked to Osaka castle, "the symbol of Osaka," which was quite near the hotel. It was shut down for the night, but we looked around the fairly dark grounds a little and up to the base of the main castle, which was brightly illuminated and quite beautiful.

From there, we went to a famous city view that Zhemin wanted to go to. Because it was Christmas eve there was a whole little fair and "German-style" Christmas market set up at the base of the skyscrapers the city view was at, and it was pretty crowded. We went up, after a pretty long line. The really great thing about this city-view was that the viewing platform was outdoors, so we could look directly out, rather than looking through glass windows. The bad thing was that it was really cold. Still, it really was quite beautiful. I spotted Osaka castle, and we also saw an unidentified but interesting red structure in the direction we'd come. So, on our way back we checked it out, and it turned out to be a big Ferris wheel in the middle of the city. We went into the shopping center there, made a stop in a cafe, and then rode the wheel, just in time before it closed at 11. This was the Hep Five wheel, I later found out, 75m in diameter, though the base of it was on, liek, the third floor above the street, so it too had a really nice view. The wheel itself, painted bright vermilion and brightly lit up with flood lights as it slowly turned, was also quite pretty.
Afterward we caught the last train home, looked up some things for the next day, and went to bed.

On the 25th, Christmas day, we set out to the Kaiyuukan, a really famous aquarium in Osaka, one of the largest in the world. As we approached on the train, I saw through the window two things that are known to excite me, which were the sea and a really big Ferris wheel. When we got to the Kaiyuukan station, the atmosphere was so different from in the city proper. It was really bright, the air from the sea was great, the streets were wide... And towering over the buildings, visible from the street, where the huge, sloping towers of suspension bridge. It actually immediately reminded me of Wildwood New Jersey, where I went on a trip the summer before last. This turned out to be somewhat prophetic since, very like the days in Wildwood, the day here turned out to be sort of a giant monster that eats more and more money.
I was, of course, quite excited at the discovery of the second unplanned Ferris Wheel of the trip. This was the Tenpozan Giant Wheel, the largest in the world when it was built. It was really pretty, all bright white structure with various colored gondolas shining in the bright sunlight. So, we rode it, and from the height of the wheel located the Aquarium, where we went next.
The Aquarium was pretty great. My favorites where the giant, 6-foot-wide manta ray and the enormous whale shark. At the cafe in the aquarium I had my first takoyaki (octopus balls). This was just slightly awkward, since we'd just seen a live, friendly enough looking Octopus in one of the tanks. But since takoyaki is supposed to be one of foods Osaka is famous for, I ate them anyway.
After the aquarium we took a ferry from there to Universal Studios Japan. I wasn't really wild about playing the admission price for a theme park, but it was hard to avoid, with Zhemin. Personally, I feel like I really don't care to travel all the way to Osaka to go to a theme park that's startlingly like the one in the US, but I tried to just think of it as a fun thing to do while on vacation.
Enter we did, however, luckily at the reduced price for after 3pm. The park was decorated quite nicely for Christmas. At Zhemin's insistence we waited the hour and a half for the one roller coaster, which was fun but really not great, as roller coasters go. Afterward, Mina and I decided to go to a super-abridged version of Wicked put on for free. It was only half an hour long (about a sixth of the length of the original, I think), and mostly in Japanese (though I could follow most of it), but still pretty enjoyable. Way too abridged to really have any dramatic impact or sense of character development, but a very nice taste of Wicked.
After that we went to the Spiderman ride, which was very good, and the Back to the Future ride, which was very mediocre. Finally, before leaving the park we watched an illuminated parade, which was kind of neat but unmemorable, and bought the only turkey I've found in Japan, a frozen drumstick from a stall vendor.
Mina and I had dinner at Mos Burger (my first time! I never see them in Tokyo...), and we all went home, I think. Overall, I was really surprised at just how unadapted for Japan the park was. I mean, sure, the theme is something like 1930's Hollywood for the outdoors, but two of the seven or so rides were Back to the Future and Jaws. Those seemed, to me, pretty outdated even in the US, and really irrelevant in Osaka. It was kinda weird. There was more Hello Kitty merchandise, perhaps, but overall I guess I was actually disappointed and bored by how very familiar it was.

I'll take a moment here to mention one thing that certainly stood out in my memory.
In Japan, escalators are everywhere. I guess it's just because space is tighter, so things are built much more three-dimensionally than in the US, where we just spread out instead of building up and down. In any case, because I don't often use escalators in the US, and because they aren't usually crowded when I do use them, and perhaps because people in the US aren't quite as rule and group-oriented, I'd never learned any particular escalator etiquette, except that it's forbidden to run up the down escalator. So, the first week I was in Tokyo I had to learn that on escalators wide enough for two people, those who want to stand stand to the left, and those who want to walk walk on the right. But successfully learn it I did.
But then, when I got to Osaka... It was reversed. People stand on the right and walk on the left. What? This was hard enough the first time. Japan's escalator etiquette is faux pas waiting to happen.

The next day Mina decided to take it easy and stay in her hotel room most of the day. Which was good in that when we were all together Zhemin was constantly annoyed at Mina for wanting to enjoy herself. Although my ideal trip is somewhere between his and hers (the two of which were vastly different), closer to hers, Zhemin listened to me better than he did to Mina, so things went more easily.
The two of us went first to Shitennoji, the "first Buddhist and oldest officially administered temple in Japan," which I'd really wanted to go to. Afterward we walked to a tower nearby, which was old and not that tall, but still had a nice view. We had some better Takoyaki from a streetside stall, and eventually headed off to about halfway between Kobe and Osaka, to Koshien, a really famous baseball stadium (僕は全然興味ないけど). It was under renovations, though, so we just walked once around the outside and got back on the train. On the way back we spontaneously got off the train at a station that was built on a bridge over a river. It was a concrete-banked river, but pretty wide, and with gently sloped concrete banks, so it was still sort of scenic. We walked about two kilometers down on one side, crossed a bridge to the other side, and walked back. From there we went to another City View, this time at the top of Osaka's World Trade Center. The whole area around it was really weirdly deserted. At this point, after a skyscraper city view, a view from a tower and two Ferris wheels, the view from this skyscraper was not that exciting, but not bad. At night the ocean (this one was right on the coast) is just black, but there were some cool, illuminated boats.

The following morning we checked out of the hotel after warming up the turkey leg in the microwave, and Zhemin left for somewhere on the train. Mina and I went to McDonald's, where she ate one of their breakfast meals and I ate a turkey drumstick. She then left for Kyoto on the non-shinkansen kyuukou trains, and I went back to Osaka castle to see it in the daylight.
I walked all around the grounds, which are really something. As an American, I almost never see structures more than a hundred years old, let alone three or four hundred. The stone walls and moats and everything are amazing, and the castle itself looks beautiful in the daylight as well. Finally, around 12:30 I bought a shinkansen ticket in Shin-Osaka station and hopped on a train (this time they were leaving, liek, every ten minutes, which was nice).

To some extent, it was a little boring, since it was traveling from one of Japan's biggest cities to another of Japan's biggest cities... But the feeling of Osaka was somewhat different from Tokyo, and there were many noticeable concrete differences (trains much less crowded, streets much wider, people in general seeming more casual). Zhemin said he liked Osaka more, but after the trip I have to say that my heart has definitely attached itself to Tokyo. Although I've only lived here three months, I still really felt some kind of sense of relief of coming home after three nights in Osaka when the train got to Tokyo. XD
And then I got off and in the station everyone was standing on the left side of the escalator and the world made sense again.