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.

Gaijin a Go-Go has a Twitter! ...also DAVE!

Decided it was time to get in on the whole Twitter thing that all the kids are talking about these days. My reasoning being that there are many cool things that happen over here that aren't quite worth an entire blog post, but can literally be summed up in a 140 characters or less and hopefully updated LIVE from my mobile phone.

Something that will require one (maybe more) blog posts dedicated to it however is my friend Dave's current tour-de-force of Kansai. While he's here I intend to show him the sights, teach him the very little Japanese I know and see what sort of trouble our combined lack of Japanese and general "gaijin-ness" can get us into. A more detailed post is sure to follow with incriminating pictures, but in the mean time some highlights include;

- Dave's discovery of the wonders of conveinance stores here and the general awesome-ness of the life-sustaining oni-giri (rice-balls) they provide.
- Clinton finding Dave some awesomely nice and cheap accomodation... in the slums of Dobutsuen-mae.
- Dave's victory over some other random gaijin at foosball.
- Clinton's repeated victories over Dave at Darts.
- Butaman!

So stay tuned...

Castles and Bikes - Clinton in Himeji

Well it's been a while, but I figure its now time to get this blog up and running again. Sophie may be back in Australia, but I'm still here and there's no sense wasting an opportunity to take yourself off to some part of the world you've never been to. In this case that part of the world was Himeji, a small-ish(?) city a little more than an hours train ride from Osaka. Himeji is famous for it's World Heritage listed castle that was built around 1580 and this was the reason that I made the journey out there.



Upon arrival in Himejii I put my guide-book to immediate use and set about tracking down the free bicycle hire place promised by Lonely Planet. I figured this would be a cool way to get myself from the station to the castle. But while I was indeed able to hire a bike at the station it turned out I needed to walk halfway to the castle to actually pick the bike up. Which kinda half-defeated the point of hiring a bike in the first place.

Never-the-less I was undaunted. Himeji City Hire Bike #14, or "Trusty" as I came to call him, was going to ferry me around town for the rest of the day regardless of the relatively short distance. Which was just as well for Trusty who was probably only a few weeks away from dropping the 'T' from his name altogether. The bald tires, the rear brakes that screamed liked a banshee and front brakes that kinda worked were not helping either. But then again I hadn't ridden a bike for a long time, and while it is true that you never really forget how to ride a bike you can get much worse at it.


My steed for the day, "Trusty" #14, together we made the streets of Himeji just that little bit less safe.

Himeji Castle is pretty much the best example of a Japanese castle I've come across. Sure, its only the second Japanes castle I've visited, but Osaka Castle is more like a fancy old building dropped in the middle of a public park. Himeji looks like the real deal, its just so... Castle-ly.

I mean just look at some of these pictures...


The rear entrance to the castle.



From the main courtyard, looking toward the front of the castle.



The view from the top of the castle looking down on Himeji.

I took about 112 photos that day, 95% of them were of this castle. There is just so much castle there and I don't think I even saw all of it! By the time I left I was starting to feel a little castle-ed out. So I sat myself down in the park nearby, drank some truly awful vending machine coffee before returning "Trusty" to the City of Himeji and hopping on a train back to Osaka. A day well spent.

Some not so good news...

Unfortunately, due to a family emergency, Sophie has had to return to Australia and will remain there for the forseeable future. If circumstances permit, she may return but at this stage it cannot be said when or even if that will be.

In the meantime I will continue to live and work in Japan and hopefully keep updating this blog.

Rawberry!

I love Japanese food. I love it soo much. Especially, I love sushi and sashimi. Mmmmm, raw fish!

There are a lot of sushi places in Melbourne, of course, but Australian sushi in general tends away from uncooked animal - the demands of local tastes, I guess. Since coming to Japan, though, I've had the opportunity to try several things that probably wouldn't sell so well in the QV food hall. For instance, I've had squid and octopus sushi, which are surprisingly un-rubbery. Also, natto sushi, which was not a good move. Clinton nearly threw up on the sushi train!

This past week, though, has topped all of that.

To start with, on Saturday we went for a meal at a crab restaurant. Here is the meal we had:


It included a starter, some boiled crab, crab sashimi, a cup of savoury custard with chestnuts at the bottom, soup, crab au gratin (basically mac cheese with crab), crab tempura, crab sushi and then ice cream (vanilla, not crab) with matcha.

It was mostly pretty tasty, and all very pretty to look at. The crab sashimi was a bit weird, though, and highly inelegant. We had to dig the raw crab flesh out of the leg cases, and it was not going without a fight. To be honest, the effort wasn't all that worth it. It didn't taste of much. It was just a sort of mildly seafood-ish jelly. But, it was an adventure just the same.

Hard to top, you may think, but nay, I say! (lol. "Nay"...) Not in Japan!

On Monday night, we went out to an izakaya with our new Japanese language class/ language exchange group. Oh, so much yummy Japanese bar food. There were many mystery things on sticks. But my eye was drawn to the picture labelled (on the English menu) "Horse Sushi"....
A couple of the Japanese ladies in our group said it was their favourite thing ever, so I said "We must order this so I can try it". And it was thus.

Horse looks and tastes a lot like beef. It is very nice. I wouldn't bother with crab again, but I'd eat more horse sushi or sashimi - "bashimi" in Japanese. (n.b. for the Japanese speakers amongst you: ba being the other reading for the kanji for uma 'horse', geddit.)?

Man, talking about food is making me hungry. I could eat a horse!


(rofl.. "Nay!")

Do the Ladder! - Drinking in Japan

This week at work I taught the meaning of the term "pub crawl" to students. See the books we use to teach over here are packed with lots of words, idioms and phrases that students will find useful for interacting with any English speaking natives they encounter. Be it here in Japan or overseas. "Pub Crawl" as it turns out is one of those necessary words. Awesome!

One student I taught had actually spent about a number of months travelling in New Zealand, so he understood perfectly what a pub crawl was all about and informed me that in fact the Japanese had their own turn of phrase for this delightful pastime. "Hashigo-suru", which translates approximately to "Doing the Ladder", is used to describe an evening of drinking in as many different bars as possible. With each bar visited representing another rung/bar on the ladder.

Also, speaking of beer, here are some 130ml beer cans I bought, because well... they're tiny! I must say though the novelty of tiny beer soon wears off when you finish the beer after about three or four mouthfuls. Regular beers cans are shown here for scale.

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...