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Today we went to Nishinomiya, which is one stop further from Umeda than Mukonoso. Lucas said it was pretty cool looking when he drove through yesterday, which corroborated the South African guy’s story, so we went over. There wasn’t much to see on the side of the station we came out on, but we stopped by a Mos Burger (Japanese burger chain) and got lunch. The Mos Burger I got was pretty good. It was a little bigger than a standard McDonald’s cheeseburger and had tomatoes and some sauce with onions in it. It also came with fries, which were dipped in Gum Syrup instead of ketchup. Danny and Lucas have been singing the praises of gum syrup the whole time, but I wasn’t overly impressed. It was good, yeah, but pretty runny. For sweet fry dipping sauce, honey is where it’s at!

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Today I went back to Kyoto to shop while Danny went to Osaka to get a guitar and Lucas stayed at the apartment and read or something (he wasn’t feeling that great)

So anyway, I went back to Teramachi street and wandered around the area for several hours going into different shops and such. There’s a sizeable coovered shopping acade area betwenn the Hankyu Kawaramachi station and the subway station to the north. There were a surprising number of other foreigners there – mostly Europeans. I went into a couple clothing stores, vaguely looking for a new shirt (I managed to stain one of mine pink by washing it with my travel sheet this mornig >.<) or a hat or something. Nothing was terribly memorable except for Neo Mart, which specialized in vintage and American import stuff (candy and chips and The Simpsons figures). I got some candy and trinkets from there. The candy is hard fruit drop things in a little metal can (as seen in Grave of the Fireflies - it has a picture of the little girl on the side). As an aside, that was a good movie. Very sad, but quite good and representative of the fact that anime is so much more than Pokemon and Dragonball.

Moving on, I stopped at a little bakery/cafe inside the subway station and then came back to
Mukonoso. Danny and I are off to go get something to eat in a little bit, so I'll post food shots when we get back if it's not too late.

[edit]Food![/food]
I didn't get these, but the machine was cool!
Pancake cup machine

Pastries from a cafe in the Kawaramachi-oike subway station:

Cham Pon from Hosai:

Today we sat around some more and read and blogged. I finally finished The Diamond Age, which is an amazing book and I highly recommend it (along with Snow Crash, also by the same author).

After reading, we went into Osaka to wander around Den Den Town for a while. We met an South African fellow at the Mukonoso train station who has lived here for 11 years or so and is currently teaching French. He suggested a club to visit around Umeda and indicated that it would be a good place to pick up chicks. He also suggested that we go to the Hankyu stop just after Mukonoso for shopping and pubs and stuff, firstly because there was a lot of interesting stuff to do there and secondly because if you stay at the pub too late, you can get a cab back for ¥900 as opposed to &yen5,000 from Osaka XP

After parting ways with the French fellow, we took the subway to Namba and headed for Den Den Town, an electronics and shopping district which is like Akihabara in Tokyo. We stopped at an arcade on the way which was not as great as I had been expecting. There were 6 floors; 1F had crane games, 2F and 3F had some kind of online trading card game where the table sensed your cards, 4F had some more online games and some panoramic Gundam games which looked pretty awesome, but you needed a player card to actually play. 5F had more standard fighters and some top-down shooters, which is where we stopped. Lucas and Danny played some Street Fighter and I played a game of Tekken. I’m pretty horrible at Tekken, so I gave it up to some Japanese kid who played as the big fat guy and was far better than I. The guy sitting to my right was even more intense. He was just sitting there in daze mashing buttons not even paying attention to his cigarette, which looked like it was about to fall out of the corner of his mouth on several occasions. The games cost ¥100 per play, which is devious because ¥100 coins are about the size, color, and weight of quarters, but worth about a dollar, so it’s easy to forget that your cramming vast amounts of money into the machines >.<

Free of the arcade, we went to some model shops, a toy store, a couple of used record stores, and an electronics store which resembled Fry's in it's stock of merchandise. The model shops were pretty cool to look around. The figures were usually pretty expensive, but some were pretty epic. Lucas will have some pics up at zenfell.com shortly. The toy store was pretty neat, too. They had Legos and misc. robotic toys as well as a small supply of plastic models. I didn't buy anything today, but Danny decided to get a guitar, which we'll go back to get tomorrow, probably.

After shopping, we went to a little restaurant where you make your order on a vending machine and hand your ticket to the cook. It was pretty good food and cheap too! The meal below was only ¥500! The soup was spicy and had pork and tofu in it, as well as some misc. vegetables.

After dinner, we headed back to Dobutsuenmae station (outside the Hotel Chuo where we stayed for a couple days) and back to Mukonoso. Lucas is playing with the cat at the moment, holding his hand out as she jumps for it. It is quite amusing and will be more so when she finally catches his hand and claws it XP

Today’s activities centered around Nara. It’s about an hour subway/JR ride from here, which makes Mukonoso a pretty convenient place to be for traveling around Kasai. A hotel near Umeda or Juso or near the subway with easy access to Umeda would be even more convenient, so I recommend that option to other travelers not lodged by the kindness of local friends

Anyway, back to Nara. It was freakin’ cold. Even my leather jacket was barely sufficient – my torso was warm, but the pockets aren’t great and my hands were freezing. Lucas was even worse off, so I suppose I can’t complain that much… But he also had gloves… It was also snowing; or at least trying to. The clouds would drop a few flakes every now and then, but mostly it was just cold and windy

So yeah, the main attraction in Nara is a big park at the end of the “main” street which was shops and stuff on it. We stopped at a noodle place for lunch (don’t remember the name) and it wasn’t that great. We all ordered the same thing because we couldn’t pronounce anything else on the menu. It looked good in the window, but upon closer inspection was only moderately tasty. It was noodle soup with fish, which would have been OK except that the fish was some brown fish which had an odd, kinda sweet flavor to it… I dunno… the noodles also tasted like an old person’s home smells, which was sub optimal… The broth was alright, though, and there were some veggies which had soaked up the flavor of a floating lemon slice, so that made up for it a little….

Moving on from the noodle place, the park was nice. It was very pretty and there were deer everywhere. Apparently the deer are a big deal in Nara – they basically have free roam of the city (they know how to use the crosswalks, which is freakin’ awesome!) People feed them by hand and pet them and such while official-looking people go around sweeping droppings off of highly-trafficked areas.

In addition to the deer, there are some large Buddhist temples in Nara. We went to Kofuku-ji first and took some pictures:

The Five Story Pagoda

The main attraction, though, seemed to be Todai-ji. You have to pay ¥600 to get in, but it was worth it. Inside is a giant Buddha and several other giant wooden statues. There’s also the “lucky hole” or some such in one of the support beams that you’re supposed to crawl through to gain good luck. It was being occupied by some jovial Spaniards (or maybe Portuguese…) at the time, so we didn’t try to crawl through.

Todai-ji Main Hall

Daibutsu of Todai-ji

Koumoku-ten

We headed back around 3 and after a stop at the video store, a short search for a guitar shop, and dinner at the ramen place next to the station, we headed back to the apartment. Danny and I watched The Magic Hour, which was pretty good. Even VLC refused to play it on either mine or Danny’s laptops, so we had to break out the PS2. After that, I put my laundry out to dry, though it will probably take a couple days if it doesn’t freeze overnight =\

So yeah, that’s the happenings up to this point. I think I might go back to Kyoto tomorrow to do some shopping…