Japan - Exploring Osaka

The first days before they allowed us in the dorms (4 nights in the hostel, only 10,000 yen ($100…about…)) all we did was explore Osaka. The girl I came with went exploring on her own, and so I decided to as well. I went outside the hostel and walked straight for about 1 hour. I saw a lot, but all there was was a city, nothing that felt like Japan, ignoring the Kanji at least.

(Click the pictures to see a bigger image)

I went back to the hostel and studied for about 2 hours, and the girl came back. She told me that the subway all day passes were only 850 yen ($8.50 just divide by 100 gets a close estimate. The dollar really sucks right now though, so it is more like around $9, but we will pretend). She gave me her all day pass, and I went to the subway system in Namba, and got off at Umeda, not really too far from each other.

I walked a random direction and found a very very long inside mall type thing. There were two halls and 3 – 4 floors with stuff on them. This thing was so long, they had roads going through them… you had to walk outside then back inside of course. There were a lot of clothes stores, like any other mall. I managed to find a watch shop and bought a cheap watch since I didn’t have one.

After exploring that mall for about 2 hours, I was walking back, and one of the roads that went through it had an “arcade” as they are called, intersecting it. An arcade is basically an outside mall. I decided to follow that. This was also very very very long. Inside this arcade was small shops and big multistory shops. This shopping area is incredibly crowded too. Well…time for pictures.

This is basically what the arcades look like… but sometimes, there is even more people.

This was in the middle of the arcade. Was really cool.

Well, that was that day. A very crowded day it was.

The next day, the girl took me to the anime store she found. It was a giant 4 story building =D. The store didn’t open until Noon, so we walked around a little. We also had… Takoyaki… Basically, octopus ball things. It didn’t taste bad (not good either), but something about chewy, creamy and crunchy didn’t go down right. I could barely stop myself from gagging…

Anyway, pictures of the area… I swear… I had more then this…

Yay for the anime store, Mandaraki

I spent a whole lot less then I thought, but I got what I wanted and a game. Oh, mangas are INCREDIBLY cheap here… You would expect them to be, but still… In America, be it because they pay a lot more people and taxes and whatnot, it is about $10 – $20 per manga. Here, the ones I looked at, were about 100 – 500 yen ($1 – $5) mostly…

After that, we went to a 4 story giant book store called book 1st.

The problem was getting across the incredibly confusing street in order to get there. I only bought this really easy language book made for foreigners. I could have bought them in the US but they were cheaper here.

Then we went to another arcade to look around.

That just about does it for that day. Well, we did see this really weird nonJapanese building among normal looking ones…

There are A LOT of soda vending machines, probably at least 2 every 20 feet (barely an exaggeration). But I was surprised to see

(They are actually all over) Ya… And they think that only 20 year olds (legal age) will smoke?? They also have beer vending machines, which the legal age is also 20. Good luck…

The next day, well… That will be on the next post (and the type of pictures you would expect from Japan)