After Nara I made my way over to Osaka, which is the place that I planned to stay the longest after Tokyo. The original plan was to stay in Osaka because of its close location to Nara and Kyoto, so that we could just take a train between the 3 places and only need one hostel. However, the hostel in Nara looked so nice that I changed that plan and reduced the time that would be spent between Osaka and Kyoto so that we could stay in the Nara guesthouse. That worked out really well, since I had exactly as much time as I needed to see Nara, had a great time there, and really enjoyed the place that I stayed at. I can't say much of the same about the Osaka hostel however.
I was misinformed when I picked the hostel for Osaka so I ended up picking one with less than perfect ratings even though the reviews of the place didn't really say what was wrong with it. When I got there I found out that there were a few things that made it inconvenient. Unlike the old house in Nara I stayed at, this building was no antique and so I thought it might be more comfortable. However, the stairs in this building were very steep and narrow which made it very hard to get luggage up. David tried to get two suitcases up at once and was about to fall down the stairs because it just wasn't possible, but I was below so that didn't happen. We got our suitcases up to our 3rd story room and checked out the place.
The whole time we had poor internet and owners who really never talked to us - they seemed unfriendly. Unlike the other places we had been to before, we were the only white people in this hostel but it seemed that almost everyone else was korean, which is odd. The first few nights there were difficult because the air conditioner in the room was turned on so low on purpose that I couldn't even feel it. Someone must have said something since after that we had proper air conditioning for the rest of the stay and I could sleep without trouble. There wasn't much else to say about the place. Nothing special happened there. Nobody talked to us and there was nothing interesting about the hostel.
About Osaka, we didn't spend much time around the area. When I got there I came to the conclusion that going to Osaka was a lot less important than I thought. It's the second biggest city in the country, but we had already been to Tokyo so it had nothing that we hadn't already seen. Beyond that, we had been to one of the more populated parts of Osaka before since it wasn't that far from where we went to school for 6 weeks. However that also meant that we knew where to shop and get food.
On shopping and food, we knew of a 10-floor electronics chain building that generally had one or three floors of the top dedicated to clothes and food. But in this particular building, the basement floors connected to an underground shopping mall that seemed to go on forever. One mall would connect to another underground and you could get lost in there. With all of the multi floor super stores, sidestreets of strip malls that go on for a great distance, and huge underground malls in various places I had the thought that if I knew how many places to shop there really were in any area, I might find that the whole country is just a very large mall.
Anyway, we spent the first day or two in Osaka. Finding out where we were staying and where there was to eat, as well as finding a movie theater so we could see batman, which we saw in english with japanese subtitles that we ignored. And that was fun. Speaking about movie theaters, I had seen two movies in total there but both times nobody left until after the credits. I think that's just how it is done there. Very patient anyway.
Instead of spending half of the time in Osaka and half in Kyoto like the plan was, we decided to spend most of the time in Kyoto since the list of things to see was long and it took a while to get there with all the connecting trains. Next post is on Kyoto!
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