Adventures in Japan

Bad Scents and Good Food

Strewn all about Osaka are things I like to call 'flavour pockets'. Scent pockets would be more correct, I suppose, since they are pockets of bad smelling air. But I call them flavour pockets because they smell so bad that you can taste them. It's very disconcerting. You'll just be walking along, enjoying your day, when BAM! Someone has shoved a skunk into your stomach via your nose. Zannen.

Today I realized just how full of people Osaka is. It's Sunday, and we got going at around noon. Good god there was a mass of humanity. I believe when there's that many people in one place they're called throngs. Luckily Carla and I are tall, so we can always keep track of each other in the crowds. Another thing we noticed sticking out from the crowd were two girls with big tall tubes strapped to their backs. Carla told me that the were practitioners of Kyuudo, Japanese archery. Intrigued, we followed them. We wanted to know where they were going with bows and arrows and all dressed up. It seems they were going out for lunch.

We finally found somewhere to cash in some of our traveller's cheques. So now we have money. Which is a nice change. The downside of having money is that you want to spend it, especially when you find yourself on a floor of a department store filled with video games and model toys. I was in geek heaven. There were monitors set up all over the place showing of games that aren't out yet. And walls filled with dating simulations. There were trailers for the New Metal Gear which Kelly would have spazzed over. It was all hot chicks and Snake getting the crap kicked out of him. The trailer for Dragon Quest 7 looked very Toriyama-y. Also, it was very loud and crowded in there. Everything was cranked way up. There was a game for the GBA that I fell in love with; a top down, fast-paced mech fighter shooter. I wouldn't be able to understand what to do or how to do it, but I crave it. I also saw Final Fantasy 1&2 and Mother (aka Earthbound) 1&2 for GBA. But I didn't cave. I am strong. Plus I'm saving my money for the DS.

That's enough of that kind of talk, I suppose. Only Seve and Kelly would understand anyways. But yeah, I was happy.

Another cool thing I saw: Coke machines that played Coke commercials. Pretty neat.

We had planned on spending most of the night blogging, but we were hungry. We thought we would just step out and get a quick bite to eat. We wandered around, trying to find a place that would feed us and supply us with our weekly supply of vegetables. Japanese food, you see, follows the Jerry school of thought; meat and potatoes. Just substitute rice for potatoes. We haven't had much in the way of veggies since we've been here.

As we were wandering, one of the Japanese pamphlet hander-outers said to me, "Take! Prease!" So I took the menu from him. "Thank you!" We looked over the menu and realized that we didn't understand most of it. While we were looking at it, the guy was saying, "Good! Japanese! Food! Samurai!" and other English words. We turned to leave, but he took our intentions to be that we wanted to go to the place on the menu. So he took us to Honjin. And that is where we ate. And drank. It was the first establishment we'd been in that didn't have pictures, or lots of hiragana/katakana that we could read. We didn't understand half of what we ordered, but it all turned out all right. We pointed at some stuff that we thought we knew and at some other stuff we hoped would be good.
The Cheese Fry was good. Fried slices of cheese. We got some eel tempura which was pretty alright. It was served whole.
Meaning it looked at us as we ate it. I asked the cook (we were seated at the bar, the bar had open flame grills on it, where the cook prepared the food) if the eel head was edible. I couldn't understand his answer at all, so I ate it anyway. Very bony. The salad we ordered had bacon, so yay us. And the omelette was covered in mushrooms. All things considered, we made out like bandits. Everything tasted SO GOOD!