Ahhh, crap. I was on a bit of a roll with this blog-writing business, and yet here we are; 18 days after the previous tale. I’m sorry, everyone. I know you were DYING to know whether we lived through the night. Well; we did. With aplomb.We awoke around 10am, shattered from the miles put in climbing Mount Misen. We decided to change our itinerary around a tad, meaning that we were going to visit Osaka today. I had found someone’s day plan on a forum I frequent and we just thought ‘fuck it, let’s copy that step-by-step’. I had heard wildly varied opinions on Osaka. One friend said it was the best city in the world, another told me it was dull and we should skip it. However, there’s only one true way to find out who’s right, right?
We arrived in Osaka and it was a balmy 21C (aahhh, remember when temperature got into double figures? #nostalgia). We first headed for TEMPLE, which was eerily quiet to say it was approaching noon, and was the weekend. It’s ok, everyone was around the corner. By this stage of the holiday, we were perfectly happy just looking at temples and not paying to go in. Taking your shoes off and putting them back on is a massive ball-ache after all. Just down the path was TEMPLE famous for the incense surrounding it. I’ll say. As if Japan didn’t smell good enough, this was the best thing to escape up my nose since that coke binge back in ’92 (jaaaaapes! I was 8 then! It was just heroin!). Julie lit a stick and stuck it in the… thing (google it for more info) and shrouded the mini-temple in smoke. It looked pretty cool, see..
Our next plan was to see the tallest skyscraper in Japan, so we ducked into a nice little park that was packed full of families picnicking. Towering above us all, the skyscraper. Cool. But WAIT. Avert your eyes downwards and to the left and you shall discover a little pen with two llamas in! Due to the interest, it was hard to get a photo. At this point, the zookeeper (?) took one by the leash and actually walked it into a mall. Loads of people followed, trying to get a photo or video of this llama. Honestly, it felt like a scene from Charles Manson’s arrest or something, but with less hair. Here’s a photo of trendsetter Julie, before other curious voyeurs followed.
Ok, we’re hungry. We took a walk to Dotonbori, a place famed for its wild restaurant fronts. Well, they weren’t wrong. One restaurant had a huge plastic octopus above it. Another an animatronic crab placed on the front. Walking around, you feel like you’re in a theme park, but somehow without that fake feeling you get. Another restaurant had a huge pool where you could catch your own lunch. We opted for the most normal looking restaurant and had the Japanese delicacy ‘random food on sticks’.
After ducking into a few Playstation shops and arcades, we headed towards a mall we’d read about with a lovely garden on the roof. On the way, we passed through the famous tech district of Osaka. It was quite bizarre in all honesty; I expected to see robot shopkeepers and iPhone 17s, but it was all VHS, DVD, CDs. Madness. When we reached the mall, we could immediately see why it had been recommended. It was quite the feat in architecture, and the garden was indeed rather lovely on the roof, and was nice to catch the final rays of the day.
Next step was to head back to Dotonbori to see along the river, and on the way I decided I was going to head into another Towers Records because why not, right? Following a tip of, I headed for the rock CDs section and managed to find defunct Sheffield band ‘Screaming Maldini’s debut album.. sold out! Impressive stuff. On another floor I could hear a live gig. I headed over and it was 3 young women singing to a backing track. There was a makeshift stage, and a sandwich board that seemed to provide stage times throughout the day. They were playing, umm, J-pop (get out clause) and there was a crowd of maybe 50 watching intently. The crowd were almost entirely made up of men of, err, my age and older. There was one stage where the band asked them to clap along and as if some nightmarish devil had dreamed it up, about 50% of the crowd clapped on 1 and 3 and the other 50% clapped on 2 and 4. It sounded horrendous. I had to get out of there, fast.
We headed for the river, and were immediately excited by bright neon and the reflective river. We spent a good while here just marvelling, and discovered that I can change the aperture on my phone, making me want to retrace the steps of my entire holiday all over again. I checked my bank balance and I confirmed no, I would not be doing that. We were especially impressed by the huge misshapen ferris wheel that encircled the Osaka branch of Don Quixote.
Ok, one last stop on this whistle stop tour of Osaka. It was an important one. A chocolate shop, bitchessssssss! It was a bit of a trek, and took a while to find, but it was all worth it. Delicious hot chocolate and scrumptious cake in a lovely wooden cafe on a mezzanine. We finished up and it was time to head back to Kyoto to meet our mate Pete. Once again, we’d never actually met Pete, but we knew him from the FAWM.org site. We have appreciated each other’s music for 9 years now, and I had promised to collaborate on his hip-hop album outside of FAWM, and I never did, so I did wonder if he’d stab me immediately upon meeting, or if he’d do it when I least expected it. We were back in Kyoto and we met Pete sat on a bench and set about finding some food. We found ourselves at a nice little ‘for the locals’ restaurant and enjoyed some noodles and wine. Julie ordered a side of plain rice and almost got laughed out of Japan. I’m trying to think of the English equivalent of this; perhaps asking for a solitary slice of bread? Who knows. I laughed along anyway, in on the joke with my homeboys. We started banging on the desks “Id-i-ot! Id-i-ot!”. I threw the pot of rice over Julie’s head and it only made people laugh harder as Julie cowered into the corner, wishing the nightmare would just end. Bah, fine. That’s all made up. Pick up again from “almost got laughed out of Japan”. We then left and headed to a pub called The Highbury which appeared to be owned by Asian Arsenal fans, naturally. Spurs (Pete’s team) were away at West Ham in an entertaining 2-3 scoreline. We chatted and drank more wine until it was time for me and Julie to leave. We were dying, man. Pete wanted beer, we wanted bed. A bad mix. We got an obligatory selfie, of course.
15 days in Japan. 