一日目と二日目 - The First Day and the Second Day
- Opinionated Night Owl
- Sep 10, 2019
- 5 min read
Let's start from the beginning, shall we? Just to get all the stats and facts to everyone. Then we can move onto the fun stuff, like photos and talk about food and me being an idiot for a while again. I'm pretty sure at least a portion of you readers enjoy that last one more than anything else I could write about.
Departure time: 17:20 (local time)
Arrival time: 9:00 (local time)
Flight time: 9h 39min
Flight company: Finnair
Schedule: on time
Temperature in Helsinki: 16 degrees (celcius)
Temperature in Osaka: 33 degrees (celcius)
My first day in Japan started above the clouds, for the flight landed at 9am in Japan time, (around 3am in Finland time). I could show you pictures of the plane, because it was the best airplane I have ever been on thus far, but to make my life harder, my smartphone decided that it wasn't happy with the location change and fucked up the memory card holding all my photos. Everything. So, all photos were deleted and I could do nothing about it. This is why I have no pictures from my flight nor from the first day. I didn't know whether to cry or be pissed.
Here's a song that really described my feelings for the latter part of the day, like from 12am - 10pm. You can read why below.
My arrival to my accommodation wasn't exactly ideal. I chose to take the airport limousine bus to Osaka-Uehonmachi and then train from there to Tamatsukuri station from where I walked the rest of the way to Grandouce Tamatsukuri Apartment Hotel. With 2 suitcases each weighing over 23kg. In +33 degrees. I thought I would die while I was riding the trains (I had to take a train from Osaka-Uehonmachi to Tsuruhashi, change to Osaka Loop line and take a train to Tamatsukuri). The escalators were hellish.
But seriously, bless all the kind locals who helped me along the way. The info lady at airport (for directing me to the bus and telling me taxis cost 20,000yen while the bus is only 1,550yen), the service box man at the train station (for telling me where I could find the correct train platform), then the two strangers at Tsuruhashi station for coming to my aid when I tried to find the Osaka Loop line platform while changing trains (a young woman with really poor English who still tried to talk to me with it at first, before I explained to her that I can speak Japanese, and a curious old man who had a rolled up magazine and kept waving it around, I suppose he tried to point the directions to me but sorry grandpa, you lost me at the first wave) and then the reception lady at my accommodation (I had to call them because the place was self-checking type, and there were no actually staff people around, so I had received the check-in information via email but because I had no internet I couldn't access it). This lady also had a hard time trying to explain to me in English how to access my mailbox where my room key would be. In the sweltering heat, sweating buckets and patience wearing seriously thin, I pretty much begged the woman to explain the procedure in Japanese to me, because I might understand it better that way, rather than the slightly broken English. It worked. I finally managed to open the mailbox (sue me for not knowing how to do it, I have never in my life had a mailbox, Finland doesn't do this kind of mailboxes! Especially in the countryside the mailboxes don't even have a locking mechanism.).
Cool things about my room?
6th floor with a balcony towards the street
King size bed
AIR-CONDITIONING
free Wi-Fi
Big bath with bathtub attached with ventilation/cooling/drying system
Washing machine for clothes
small kitchen
I did have time to wander around a bit and fall in love with an ice cream shop and a melon pan store as well as to discover a local shopping district (shoutengai 商店街). I searched and found a big enough electronics store that sold adapters (How could I have forgotten to buy one before?!), got lost in the train station, found a 100yen store and ate yakisoba at a Japanese restaurant.
(Most of these places will be later on found on Recommendations.)
Something I also noticed, is that this city seems to come to life during evenings, rather than daytime. Sure the shopping district is more active during daytime but in the evenings the atmosphere is more bubbly and casual (?) around the city. It's a great time to have walks around the town, because the sun isn't trying to murder you, the lights are pretty and the place is bustling with life. (Okay, let's keep in mind I have here for 2 days. I could be wrong. This is my first impression alright? And I know the photos aren't exactly filled with people but for my defense I was going for a scenic shot.)
So, during my trip to acquire an adapter for my electric appliances, public transportation proved to be a mighty opponent and it won this round. At first I rode past my stop (Tsuruhashi) because the rush-hour proved to be scary as hell (what the hell is up with the amount of people here?) and rode all the way to Tennouji. And then because I attempted to go back I got lost trying to find my way to the opposite platform. And the left-side traffic also confuses the hell out of me. Am I supposed to dodge the people to left or right? Does it matter? And the pedestrian walkways? Is there or is there not a lane for bicycles? I was almost ran over a dozen times by those two-wheelies today but still nobody says anything? Like, tell me if I'm in your way or walking somewhere I'm not supposed to, please, how the hell would I know otherwise?
Melon de Café: I ate a plain melon pan (it's a sweet kind of bread) and ice tea.
First Day's dinner was a karaage (stir-fried chicken) lunch box from next door's Bentou-ya (Lunch Box Store). It was good and cheap, 450yen altogether.
や台や玉造町 - Yataiya Tamatsukuri: yakisoba and peach soda. 1,036yen.
A funny difference to restaurants in Finland: the staff were extremely vocal. So were the customers. Everyone was shouting something all the time; customers for additional orders or wanting to pay for their meals (or just generally chatting and laughing) and the staff kept shouting the orders and who was doing and what and every time someone noticed a customer shouting to them, they shouted that they had noticed the first shouting, and then a server shouted that they heard that another staff member had noticed it, and announced that they were on it. Then they shouted the additional order to the kitchen staff and so on, the shouting circle kept going on. It was amusing to follow. The mood was very merry and people came and went.
This post's end was pretty much all food, heh, hups. I couldn't resist. Food is good and I can actually enjoy it. Also with the latest trouble with my phone's memory card and photographing anything I haven't dared to go actually sightseeing yet. Maybe tomorrow, since I brought a new memory card and it seems to work alright... Let's hope it continues to do so. Otherwise I'd have to go buy an actual camera. I took a peek at the prices today and reality smacked me in the face. The cheapest one I found was 28,000yen. Cameras are expensive. I was reminded.
Now I only have to deal with getting an internet connection for my phone so that I could actually use, for example, the maps and navigation while wandering around? So far I have just gone on with intuition and train maps.
BTW, it's going to take a while for me to start updating those recommendations. Sorry about that.
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