Japan 2006, Part 8

Day 8

The morning after was great because we had a chance to eat breakfast at the Sky Restaurant. Dinner the night before didn’t really have me eating much, so I was really hungry by now. I’m glad that they had food I liked at breakfast. Surprisingly, I passed the bacon, eggs and sausage I normally would’ve gotten and went straight for the Japanese breakfast. My plate was full of fried noodles, Japanese omelets, some kind of dumpling, fish, and a side of misou soup. We grabbed a window seat and enjoy the scenery during our meal. This morning had a cloudy overcast, so I really couldn’t see very far into the distance (no Mt. Fuji). However, I still enjoyed seeing the town busy with activity. I saw a couple busses pass by as well as a few students on bikes heading to school. I saw clothes hanging outside the packed apartment complexes and even a cemetery in the distance.

The restaurant itself is located on the 7^th floor of the west wing. It’s huge ball room surrounded by windows. In the middle of the room was a buffet style set, with western style food on one side, and Japanese food on the other. There was another section of bread, drinks, and dessert. Behind that table was a lady who would pass out bowls of rice and misou. I can remember the room was a yellowish color, very light yellow, almost white. It had a nice roomy feel to it, so it was easy to get comfortable while eating.

Today was also our last day of sightseeing. After the ryokkan, all that was left of our trip was the actual traveling back to Osaka, and eventually the airport. There’s no shinkansen straight to Osaka from where we were so our entire day was pretty much spent traveling. After checking out, the hotel concierge gave us a ride to the train station. The path we had to take first had us going back to Tokyo. On our way here, we took local trains all the way to Fuji. This time, we wanted to take a coach bus back. The bus ride was about 3 and half hours long, with 3 stops along the way. The first stop was right in front of the amusement park, which looked bigger than I thought it would be. On that stop, we picked up a family that spoke English. They had a British accent, which I haven’t heard once since I arrived in Japan. The other 2 were some random ones I didn’t pay attention to, was too busy looking at the scenery. After the 3 hours, we found ourselves at Tokyo terminal, a very familiar place to us by now. At this point, we were debating whether or not to store our luggage somewhere and finish shopping aka Akihabara or to just take the shinkansen back. We ended up choosing the latter because we couldn’t find any lockers big enough to store our luggage.

The shinkansen ride was much more comfortable, but longer. It took about 5 hours on a train going 200 mph to reach Osaka. Nothing much happened on the train; I just read the signs trying to learn more kanji. On a separate thought, my kanji reading has gotten better in the past week than in the entire year I had in Japanese class. There’s this attendant that walks around with a cart offering all sorts of drinks and cold foods. She came around maybe 3 or 4 times, yes I was that bored to count the times certain people walk through. Our car got a few more passengers, but not crowded like in the local trains.

We arrived at Osaka station around 7:30 pm and headed back to the hostel we went to the first time we arrived. The one thing I hate about this station is that you have to climb 2 flights of stairs just to get to the platforms. It isn’t so bad if you had nothing on you, but we had our luggage with us, so it was a workout going up and down those stairs. There’s something about Osaka station that I really liked, it was the amount of stuff you can get there. I know there was more stuff at the bigger stations like Tokyo and Kyoto, but Osaka had a lot of small shops. We were all starving when we arrived, so passing all the bakeries, ramen shops, etc, etc made me very hungry.

As we arrived at the base of the hostel, a bunch of noisy Japanese ladies came in and piled on the elevator we were waiting for. It ended up that Roy didn’t get to ride the first one up there and all they were saying was just to come in anyway and saying sorry. A little useless info, but I found it funny. We checked into the hostel and went into our room. Luckily, the front desk told us no roommates tonight. The lobby was full of Korean tourists sitting around in the tables and watching tv. The hostel has nice bookshelves full of manga. There were children and adults alike sitting on the elevated floor reading them. We all shuffled into our room to unload our gear and talked about where to eat next. Our first thought was to eat at the seafood place downstairs by the elevator. As we went past it, Roy couldn’t read any of the kanji and decided not to eat there. I suggested that we head back to the station because there was this ramen shop that caught my eye was we were coming from the shinkansen. At this point, we were all starving and didn’t really care where we went, so off to the station we headed.

At the station, we made a beeline to the shop and were greeted by a couple of the workers there. Outside of the shop they had plastic representations of what they were serving. I had my eye on the beef ramen ever since we passed it the first time, so my mind was already set. Roy had the same thing, Hugh got the pork version, and Kuya Phil got fried chicken. With this ramen, it also came with a bowl of fried rice. I don’t know what they did to it, but it was very tasty. Carlo’s travel tip: Japanese portions are usually small, with the exception of ramen, which are served by huge bowls. After that very fulfilling meal, we started headed back to the hostel to prepare for tomorrow’s flight home. Roy spotted a nice pudding shop and bought something with Phil. The main reason why Roy wanted to buy it was because he wanted to chat with the cute girls running the shop. I can’t blame him, they were pretty cute though. However, Phil was complaining later that night about how he feels funny eating it..food poisoning maybe?

We arrived back to the hostel for good and I decided to go to the lobby to hang out and catch up on the blog. I’m an avid people watcher, so staying in the lobby was a real treat for me. As usual, the bookshelves had kids surrounding it reading their manga(s) for the night. There were a couple German people there discussing over a map, and there was a table with 2 Japanese and a Polish person. It was an interesting scene because the polish guy could speak a little English, one of the Japanese guys spoke fluent English, and the other Japanese didn’t speak any English. So, when the no-English Japanese guy talked, the fluent English Japanese guy would use broken English to try to communicate with the Polish guy who spoke a little English. They didn’t mind, because they were laughing and having a good time. From my seat I could see the cafeteria where the Korean tour group was doing some sort of activity that consisted of waving hands and walking around the tables. Don’t ask me, I just write what I observe. The wireless still didn’t work, I know I must be doing something wrong, but at least I can catch up with the blog. 30 minutes later, Roy and Phil came up to see what I was doing and decided to eat their ice cream at my table. They commented on what we’ve been doing this past week and how we’re going to miss all of this. We stayed and talked for about 15 minutes before those two decided to go back to the room to play UNO. Meanwhile, I stayed at the lobby to continue my people watching/blog writing. I stayed upstairs for maybe 15 minutes more before I got tired and went back down the room where the other 3 were in an intense game of UNO. I ended up just watching them for an hour while plugging in my electronics to charge. We all did our nightly toiletries and headed to bed, knowing that our Japanese vacation was coming to a close.