Tokyo Tofu Japan » Seishun 18 Monday

Monday, April 10. The last day that I could use a Seishun 18 ticket for my time in Japan. On today’s schedule: Brian and I were going to hit up an aquarium in Osaka that I had been hearing good things about, one last visit to a Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, and then visiting Denden Town, Osaka’s answer to Akihabara, where Brian was hoping to buy an external hard drive so that he could (finally!) leech some of my anime fansubs and pictures.

Leaving JCMU at an ungodly hour, I was going to meet Brian at Omihachiman station where we were supposed to find each other on the same train in car #6. Plan B was to meet at the Mannekkin waffle store in Kyoto station, which is exactly what I ended up doing since Brian took a train a few minutes earlier than me. Luckily this allowed for us both to buy some still-hot waffles. (Yet another food store you just can’t find in the US: a waffle store.) Sadly by the time we bought our waffles and got back onto the train platform, the weather had turned from threateningly overcast to outright pouring. This wasn’t going to deter our plans, however. Waiting in line for the train, it was taking forever to come and eventually the sign indicated that it was going to be late, so we made the ultimately bad decision to bail from our position in the front of the line and instead get on the train immediately behind us which was also going to Osaka. This train turned out to be a local and took us almost an hour and a half to get to Osaka, instead of 45 minutes. During this extra time I was able to just kind of stare out the windows of the train and look at the Japanese countryside, thinking about how in 2 weeks time my scenery would change entirely. All along the train tracks there was flowering sakura, especially lining school yards and river beds. Arriving in Osaka some time later in the rain, we decided to change our plans a bit and go to the HRC first to eat lunch. Brian was nice and treated me (yeah I kinda forced him hehe) due to the repeated times that I lent him my floor/other room + breakfast (which
was never written about here due to the fact that it was *against the rules* and certain JCMU admin types used to read my blog and on another occasion when I broke a rule I got chewed out a bit, but his ex-roommate always gave him a hard time about staying over whenever he missed a train so I talked him out of sleeping in the computer room on a number of occasions). While sitting in the same table that I swear I’ve been seated at on at least 2 other occasions, another American couple was seated right next to us, and after a bit we got started talking with them. Turns out they owned a fabric company that supplied product to a bunch of famous companies, like Adidas and Nike. They had factories in Japan, the US and Hong Kong and they were currently visiting all of them. After talking with them for a while about globalization, Japanese business practices, and more for another 20 minutes,
we were able to extricate ourselves back out into the rainy afternoon where we returned to the subway to make our way to Osaka Kaiyukan Aquarium, which supposedly has one of the largest tanks in the world.

After a few train transfers, and a short walk through the rain, we made our way into the aquarium, which was located in a cube-shaped building with an aquatic-themed mosaic exterior. Because of the weather, there were only a few people milling around the entrance of the aquarium, plus one unfortunate worker who had to stand outside in a rain coat with a mega phone to help guide the nonexistent crowds towards the entrance. Paying the 2000yen admission fee, we entered the aquarium by way of an escalator which took us from the second floor all the way up to the 8th floor, and from there we made our way through the entire building by walking in wide circles, always walking slightly downhill. There were no staircases between floors, and when we reached the 5th floor, we could view the main tank of the aquarium, some 5,400 tons of water behind a 30cm thick panes of acrylic glass, which was 3 stories tall. As you walked down and down and down you could look inside the aquarium and look at people looking in on the floor above and below you, all while viewing the world’s largest fish, the whale shark, along with various rays and many other schools of fish. Other exhibits of note include the incredibly strange sunfish (no, its not the kind of Sunfish you might be familiar with), some cool penguins, fugu (which I never got to eat, sigh), and some Sirotans….I mean, seals. In the gift shop, I had self control and didn’t buy any of the number of cute stuffed things they had, but did get a coin with a penguin on it. When we were done in the aquarium, we made our way back out into the rain (passed a Coco’s that was attached to a mall next to the aquarium, laughed) and navigated ourselves back to (something) station, from which we would attempt to find Denden Town. By this time it was around 4:30pm and we only had a vague idea of how to get to DenDen Town. We were able to ask someone at an information desk how far we had to walk, and we were informed that we might be too late for most of the stores (one thing you might not expect: even in cities like Osaka and Tokyo, stores and restaurants close at insanely early hours). The rain had let up so we decided to take our chances and walk the rest of the way there. After a good 20 minutes of walking, we discovered we were in fact going in the completely wrong direction, so walking allll the way back we did end up finding some promising looking stores. (It certainly wasn’t anything like Akihabara though, so stick to Tokyo for the high-end electronics shopping.) Brian was able to find a really good deal on a hard drive in the very first store that we went into, so with that our mission was accomplished. At this point my goal of getting back to JCMU by 6pm to begin studying for the exam on Thursday was totally shot, so we hustled our bustles back to the nearest train station.