Last day in Osaka: some more shopping (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Pictures for day 13.

Sorry for the odd ordering. I only had time for a quick "I'm home" earlier today :)

On my final day in Osaka I'd decided to do some last minute shopping. I still wanted DVDs 4 and 5 or Romeo X Juliet and the Nana OST CD. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find either, though Niels-sama bought me a lovely present: Gauche the chellist on DVD. He knows I love Ghibli films ^_^ Thanks again Niels!

I did manage to score on my final item on the list: the traditional cloth hangings at the entrance of a restaurant (like these). I thought it'd be a cool idea to have those hanging in front of our kitchen door :) Niels, Katrien and I went on a trek through the huge, Osaka shopping streets, finally ending up at the Doguyasuji shopping street. Doguyasuji is home to about forty stores catering to the local diner and restaurant businesses. Their stores carry everything from raw ingredients to cookware, knives, stoves, uniforms and furniture. Honestly, anything you need to run a restaurant can be bought over there :)

And it was over there, in a small, tucked away store, that I managed to get my hands on a discounted (Y2000!) hanging! It even matches the colour of our doorposts perfectly :)

In the evening I had okonomiyaki again, this time at the small restaurant next to our apartment building. The joint looks quite grubby, but the food was awesome :D

By the way: there are no pics for day 12. That day was spent completely on sleeping in and eating. Robert and I first went to the post office, to ship home all of my purchases. After that we had lunch at Yodobashi Camera's food court and just headed back to rest up. I felt a bit ill and got a total of thirteen hours of sleep! o_O

Posted in: doguyasuji , osaka , shopping

Just a quiet day (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Pictures for day 7

Yesterday I'd decided to make it a very slow day: I'd stick around Osaka to recuperate from New Year's and to rest up a little bit. I stayed in bed (with my laptop) until ~11:30, cleaned the apartment and did the dishes. Then, around 14:00 I went out to Shitennoji temple again. I wanted to see it by daylight as well :)

Afterwards I wanted to go back to Den Den Town, to see if any of the shops were open. On January the first, usually -everything's- closed over here. Luckily, two of the shops that I'd been meaning to visit were indeed open: Super Kids Land and Super Potato. The latter being a (retro) video game store and the first being a toy/chara/model shop.

It's a shame that dutch law explicitly forbids the ownership of Airsoft guns, because oh man! SKL has a whole floor dedicated to those things and some of them are exquisitely crafted! Around Y2000 will get you a simple Desert Eagle lookalike, that simply put looks awesome. Now, I'm absolutely of a fan of guns etc, but the idea of owning a replica of Rally Vincent's (from Gunsmit Cats) CZ75 seems way cool to me ^_^;

I also managed to get lost on my way to Den Den Town. Not by far, but I did end up in one of Osaka's unsavory districts. Niels and Robert assure me that it may look a bit threatening (to a gaijin), but that I was still perfectly safe. Still, to my westerner's reflexes being surrounded by homeless folks, drunks and ramshackle kots made from a few planks felt unsafe. =_=; Menno, you asked about hobos earlier? Go over there and you'll find them aplenty :)

When I got out of that district, I ran into the abandoned Festival Gate amusement park. It's an indoor amusement park, which runs straight through a mall. The roller-coaster winds through a number of buildings and can be clearly seen from both the streets and the trains. The design may be godawful, but the concept's pretty cool.

Posted in: den den town , osaka , quiet day , shitennoji

Den Den Town and New Year's eve (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Pics for day 6.

Yesterday was my first real day spent in Osaka, after travelling to Tokyo, Kobe and Arima. I tagged along with a group of my friends who'd wanted to go shopping at Yodobashi Camera and Den Den Town (Osaka's electronics and otaku heaven).

I didn't care much for Den Den Town, which looked rather rundown to me. Sure, they have a bunch of nice shops in there, but I think I feel better about Akiba. I'm sure that my buddies Edmond and Frank would love Yodobashi Camera though! OMG, they've got a whole floor filled with nothing but cameras, lenses and accessories. It'd be their personal Mekka, I reckon :) All the stuff they'd ever want to play with at their fingertips! Thing is: unlike stores in the Netherlands, YC has -all- the cameras you can think of (except maybe the Hasselblads) and you can try them out completely. Nice!

As you've already read, New Year's eve was quite nicely spent at "home". We got together to watch the traditional musical contest on NHK. We left for Shitennoji temple around 2230, rang the bell for the new year and got our prediction for 2008. After that we headed to the Osakajo temple, since they at least had fire baskets out ^_^ Last night was damn cold out!

I got home around 02:30 and went straight to bed. Woke up around 08:00 to call all of my relatives and wish them a happy new year. Ah, this was nice :)


Posted in: den den town , new years eve , osaka , osakajo temple , shitennoji temple

Comiket #73 and going back to Osaka (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Pictures for day 5.

I got up around 08:30 and took care of the hotel's checkout. Luckily I could store my backpack behind the front desk, because there was no chance in hell that I'd drag that huge thing around the whole day. Speaking of the hotel: I took my breakfast there (as opposed to getting a pizza pan from 711 again) and I have to say that I really like the classical, Japanese breakfast.

My plan was to visit the Tokyo Big Sight, to attend day 2 of Comiket #73. This day revolves around manga drawn for the female audience, which are usually the stories I like a lot. There's something about the characters and stories that is more attractive to me.

Comiket, for those not in the know, stands for Comic Market. It's a huge convention, focused completely on amateur and semi-pro comics. Over the course of three days, about 35.000 groups of artists sell their manga to over 500.000 visitors. The event is spread across four square kilometers of convention space, bound together by a few kiloms extra of hallways.

I wanted to visit Comiket at least once, just to see what it's all about. I'd heard a lot about it and it really is quite an important event for otaku in Japan. Of course, it also featured prominently in one of my favourite anime, Lucky Star. So far I'd only seen dutch doujinshi and this's made me very curious about how things are done in Japan. I'll discuss that a little more in-depth in the next blog post.

In the meantime, let me say that the Japanese are the masters of crowd control! At no point in time were the crowds forced to a standstill, there was no shouting and shoving and there were no accidents. In general, everyone was disciplined and well behaved :) It's amazing to seen about 10.000 people, crammed into a square kilometer, without any crap breaking out.

A lot of Comiket's visitors come there with a plan. A few weeks before the event, their catalogue (about the size of a phonebook) is printed and people decided on which artists they really want to visit. This usually leads to big checklists, with exact "addresses" in the convention halls. It's all quite efficient :) Armed with checklists and shopping trolleys, these hardcore fans race across the festival, to ensure that they get everything they wanted.

I on the other hand went in there with only one plan: there is no plan :D

I'd decided for myself that I'd spend no more than Y10.000 (62 euros) and that I'd leave once I'd done so. Stats at the end of the Y10.000:
* I'd visited 1 row of clusters in 1 of the halls. This relates to about 1/12th of the whole con space.
* I'd spent about 3 hours circling that single row of clusters.
* 1 cluster consists of about 28 groups and one row of 15 clusters. This means I visited about 420 artists.
* I'd bought 23 doujinshi, ranging in price between Y100 (62 cents) and Y1200 (~7.5 euros).

Because my trip "home" was bound to be a long one, I'd decided to skip the rest of Comiket. I even skipped taking photos of all the cute/sexy/cool cosplayers.

Ah! A tip, if you're ever in Tokyo and have an hour or two of free time: ride the Yurikamome line back and forth, from Shimbashi station. This "train" (though it's more of a bus on a guided track) will take you past some awesome architecture, with the prettiest buildings in Tokyo. It'll also give you a great look at the Tokyo skyline, as seen from the bay.

Before heading to the Shinkansen, I'd lunch at Coco Ichibanya Curry, which is a chain of restaurants that I would heartily welcome in the NL. ^_^ Their curries are awesome, though I will never take anything about heat level 2. I think that my buddy Edmond (who usually puts tabasco on anything he eats) would stop around level 3. It's scary to think that things can go up to level 6. o_O;

The Shinkansen ride back to Shin-Osaka was comfortable, yet very busy. It was the day before New Year's and everyone was going back home for the holiday. Tokyo station was loaded with people and It was getting quite hard to move around. And yet again the Japanese shone in their displine! Travelers waiting for their trains were neatly lined up at the tracks and again there was no pushing or shoving. Very nice.

I got "home" around 20:30, had dinner (takeout udon noodles from 711) and had a chat with my roomies. Today (the 31st) I'll stick around Osaka and tonight I'll celebrate New Year's with some of them. Mostly, I'll be resting up a little bit :) the past five days have been very busy!

Posted in: comiket , comiket #73 , osaka , shinkansen , tokyo

We're here and it's great! (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Photos for day 1.

Wow, what a trip!

The 24 of us left Schiphol airport on the evening of the 25th, after gathering around 1700. As can be imagined, maneuvring such a huge group through three major cities' airports can be a bit of a hassle, but luckily we didn't loose anyone ^_^;

Right now it's about a quarter to four in the morning, local time (19:45 in the Netherlands) and I can't really sleep. I thought I'd setup the Wifi basestation Robert brought along, to save some time in the morning. I've never setup any Linksys hardware, except for that crap Wifi card, so I'm hoping this'll be painless.


(Crap... Apparently I woke up Niels-sama with my annoying cough)

Anywho... This was my first trans-continental flight and I have to say I'm impressed by Japan Airlines flights. We flew aboard a 777 that was next to empty, so each of us got a row of three seats to himself. That way we could kind-of lie down to sleep a little.

I'd packed my backpack with all kinds of stuff, just to get through the sixteen hour trip, but honestly: I never touched any one of them. The in-flight entertainment offered by JAL was more than enough to keep me entertained. The offer a pick of twenty movies, so there's really something for everyone. I tuned into the 50' JPop channel while trying to sleep and was pleasantly surprised by The Drifters, with Ii yu da na, which is a song that I -really- love :D

BTW: I stopped Transformers about half way through. OMG, that's a crap movie ;_; ChildhoodMemoriesRaped++

Oh yeah... The stop over at Narita airport was pretty nice. We'd to wait a little for Niels to get all the railcards and other paper worked sorted, but after that it was clear sailing. Niels and I hit the showers to freshen up a little and it worked a treat :) After that, the flight to Osaka was a breeze.

We took the shuttle bus to Obenobashi station, so we could take the metro into Osaka. Luckily, the train makes a direct line to "our" station: Tanimachi 4choma. A few minutes walking from there took us to our home for the next two weeks: Weekly Mansion Otemae. The appartment isn't very large, with two bedrooms, a cramped living room and the tatami room, but it's damn well good enough for us! ^_^

Oh! Remember how I got serious stomach aches at Christmas, from overeating? Well, I'd been feeling "full" ever since, but our late-night curry dinner fixed a lot :D Even at "level 2", that stuff is quite spicy! ^_^;

Right... Now I'm off to hack that base station. I'll sort through my pictures tomorrow and start posting stuff later.

Posted in: japan , japan airlines , osaka , trip , weekly mansion otemae