Osaka Nights!

Dave visited Osaka this week and while his days were spent sightseeing around the Kansai area on his lonesome as I was working, we did manage to catch up most evenings for a few drinks and what have you ("what have you " generally being more drinks). So instead of pictures of us in front of temples and beautiful japanese scenery most of the photos I have are of us out-on-the-town in Shinsaibashi. Here are some of the shenanigans that took place...


We played an AWFUL lot of darts, so much so by end of the week we were getting pretty good. These photos were taken before then.


Drinking. We did quite a bit of that too.


Simply stopping to check your map in Shinsaibashi can have hilarious consequences.


Deciding to combine drinking, darts and Japan in to a single package I took Dave to a local darts bar named "Bull" that I often go to. Here our lack of Japanese skills and the fact that it was 3am at the time resulted in this photo. We think it may have been someone's birthday... we're not sure.

Other highlights of the week included...
- Getting our arses handed to us when we tried to play Street Fighter 4 and Tekken 6 as we couldn't find the "Please don't randomly match me up against other players in the arcade who are ten times better than me" button.
- Seeing the sights of Den-Den-Town (but NOT going to a Maid Cafe cos it would have been WEIRD).
- Watching an English Improv comedy show (The Pirates of Dotonbori) on Sunday night then proceeding to stay out till first trains at 5AM.
- Failing to go to Kobe the following Monday as we nursed our hangovers.

By now Dave has left Osaka, but I'll hopefully be catching up with him tomorrow night in Kyoto for one last night out before he heads off to Tokyo.

REAL Big Fish!

Alright! Happy 2009 everyone!
Due to family commitments, our winter break hasn't been quite as adventuresome as we'd originally planned. But yesterday we went to Osaka Aquarium. Get ready for some extreeeeeeeme fish!
(My camera's not very good in low light, so the photos are a bit fail, I'm afraid.)

Osaka Aquarium (or Kaiyuukan, for those of you interested in the lingo) is allegedly the biggest in the world, but its main claim to fame seems to be the two whale sharks it houses. It has a lot of other stuff too. Like otters, and a sloth! I don't think sloths are even properly aquatic. I guess they swim somethimes? I don't know. As far as sloths go, this one doesn't seem to have got the memo about being slothy - it was hanging from the top of its cage, rocking on like someone who's got their mp3 player up to loud and has forgotten everyone can see them dancing.

Never mind that, I'll cut to the chase. Here's a whale shark:

Cool, huh?
And here's another one:

Seriously awesome to see in action. As was the ginormerous manta ray:

It's hard to tell the scale in that picture, but I guess the ray was about three metres across. So beautiful. I love rays, there's something very serene about them. But that wasn't my favourite thing...

Do you know what a sunfish is? Go and look it up on Wikipedia. I've always wanted to see one, because they are freaky. I was pretty stoked when I heard there were sunfish at Osaka Aquarium. Here's one:

It came right up to the glass and blooped at me. That was pretty cool, being face to face with a sunfish.
In the same tank as the sunfish, there were some octopi. Here's what underneath an octopus looks like:

Those eight-legs move along pretty quick! It kind of pours itself accross the glass, like a liquid made of legs.
Speaking of animals that are mostly made of legs, they had some of those crazy Japanese crabs, as well. For some reason, I felt like they should have been dancing in a chorus line. With little hats and canes, right? (Please tell me you see it too...)

Also, there was a very nice jellyfish display. True, it's not an exciting photo, but I love the colours.

Nearby the aquarium is a big-arse Ferris wheel - also allegedly the largest in the world, at 112 metres high. The Ferris wheel was pretty cool, and we timed our visit just right, because the sun was going down and the city lights had just come on. Here's a view down onto the aquarium from the wheel. It's the building with the green lights around the top and the big white triangle in front:

So, I'll leave you with some random Osaka, as seen from the Ferris wheel. The aquarium is in the bottom right corner there, and to the left (right in the middle of the bottom) is the Suntory Museum, which I suspect we may be going back to another day...

The Photo Edition

We've had a big week, as it was our first week actually teaching students. It went pretty well. It's quite scary, but we're getting the hang of it.

Today we organised to have internet connected at our flat. It won't happen for a month, though. Once it does things should get more interesting around here... Who knows, maybe Clinton will even post!

Anyway, here are some photos, largely pertaining to the first post...

Clinton playing shamisen

Samurai!

Spiderzilla!
(Unfortunately, the council came and trimmed the bushes, so Spiderzilla is no more.)

Clinton and 280 yen yakitori (mmmmm, tasty)

Hmmm....

(We saw this in Amerkiamura, a place I shall have to go into great detail about later.)

I'd like to conclude by apologising for the formatting of this post. The blogspot editor is crummy.