Embarkment

The trip to Osaka and Tokyo will cover four days of the blog. This will allow me to cover the trip in more detail, considering I was gone for two weeks, and also allow me to waste time in real life playing video games and sleeping in instead of finding exciting things to do so that I can blog about them. Not that I do that normally, but I like to pretend it happens. Here is part one of four.

I woke up early the morning that I was going to leave, excited to get the hell out of Beppu. I was packed and ready and got some food and some Hi-chew (it's delicious fruit candy. SO GOOD) and promptly sat around for 6 hours. I was going to clean my room, but the best I did was throw out some pop bottles and get some air freshener for the toilet room so that it wasn't rank by the time I got back. I hit that "I'm on vacation" vibe before I even left, so wasn't really in the mood for any physical exertion.

The instant I made it to the ferry station I become idiot foreigner guy again. I asked somebody where the boarding dock was and went up, then tried to hand the attendant my payment receipt. He looked troubled (probably because he didn't know how to explain the situation in English and wasn't sure if I'd understand Japanese) so instead of attempting anything verbally, he picked up a ticket slip from the bin, showed me the difference between my paper and his, made a gesture to indicate exchanging them, then said to go downstairs. Alright, sure. So I did that and happily handed the woman my paper to exchange it for a ticket. Apparently I needed to fill out a travel identification form (which I had been given and simply stared at blankly and tucked away instead of filling out). So after that, everything worked out fine and I found my room. At which point I was filled with a sense of "Uggh."



I got to sleep on the floor! On a boat! Wow! And there were tiny compartments to store the luggage over my head, so I was filled with a sense of dread that we'd hit stormy seas and everything would spill out and crush me to death. Ack. On top of that I was retarded when entering the room and didn't look down far enough to see my "bunk" number (the opposite side of the room had them listed on the wall, my side had them on the floor) so an old Japanese man was kind enough to point it out to me.

The food was pretty good on the boat, but expensive. There wasn't much else to do, other than an onsen which I'm pretty sure was exclusive to the higher class people (damn you second class C package!) so I went up to my room and read, watched movies, and slept erratically. This was my first time on a boat, and the swaying was neat at first, but then I realized it wasn't actually comfortable in any fashion, and made finding a good position to sleep in relatively difficult.

But I made it to Osaka in one piece (yo ho ho). Then I had to wait for Runa to wake up and come fetch me because I had no idea where I was or what to do. So I went outside the station and read more of my book as a bunch of middle schoolers passed by, making me feel like some gigantic pervert staking out his prey. That was pretty awkward.

After we checked into my hotel we waited for her boyfriend to show up and went for some food and such. Also random window shopping. Mostly I was just overwhelmed by Osaka being 4 times the size of Beppu, and I was taking that in for a bit. Also, Miley Cyrus cds.



After we met up with Dan, we went to see the peach blossoms (like cherry blossoms, only much less important to Japanese culture and also in bloom at the time). That lasted about 20 minutes of me taking photos of trees and birds and a big castle! In the distance. Then we went to Den Den Town which is the equivalent to Akihabara (Tokyo's electronics district, hugely nerd famous) but in Osaka. Then I got sick because of all the smoke in the city, and that was not fun. I need to get one of those face masks sometime.

I went back to my hostel and got nice and comfy, passing out with my glasses on and the light and tv on due to exhaustion from lack of sleep on the ferry.