Osaka

Day 258 – Parents avert your eyes

We spent almost the whole of today planning and about 3 hours in the post office trying to post home everything we didn’t need anymore. It is quite liberating to have such a light pack again!

We did have some Japanese fun later in the afternoon though. We had found ourselves in the middle of the “Love Hotel” district, so we went to check them out. We had found a funny website talking about the types that use a love hotel and suggesting that finding an ‘unusual’ room was part of the fun. The website guy had found all kinds of rooms including one with dodgem cars, underwater scene i.e. completely surrounded by fish tanks, subway train car, Winnie the Pooh and even Hello Kitty S&M!

The whole thing is anonymous so when you go in there is usually a reception room with a snap shot of each room on a board. The ones that are free are lit up and the ones that are taken are blacked out. More than half the rooms in every hotel were blacked out at 4pm on a Monday afternoon! We didn’t find anything interesting in the end, just normal looking hotel rooms, boring.

Had cool waterfalls outside but boring standard rooms inside.

The Puppy Hotel. This is wrong – puppies can be scarred for life too!

Most of the other hotels had even more than this blanked out!

Ha ha!

Just some diamante studded cars we passed on the way.

Some outfits for rent! Hopefully disinfected and dry cleaned…

Instead we headed to our last sushi train dinner and then drinks at a place called “Planet 3rd”, a really cool little bar, in the bottom of our building ; )

Matt enjoying his last sushi train.

Osaka at dusk.

Day 259 – Sayonara Japan! Tanoshikatta ne! (It was fun!)

Packing today was easy with half a pack! We looked at some last minute stuff for the Philippines (I don’t think we have ever been more under-prepared turning up to a country!) and decided to kill our last few hours in Japan finding funny mistranslated and sometimes just plain gibberish t-shirts. We found a few good ones, but given Japanese sizes are small, extra small and extra extra small, nothing that didn’t look like my little sister’s. Matt was fitting into a “medium” for the first time in his life and settled on a “short muzzles” t-shirt with bulldogs on the front, but didn’t end up liking any of the gibberish ones enough to actually wear [Matt - I really liked one, but it was just too wrong, I think I could have been arrested for wearing it in Australia].

Our last meal was going to be gyoza, not exactly Japanese, and not very filling so we called that breakfast and hopped into some all-you-can-eat sushi we found right at the last minute before we got on the plane for our 5 hour flight to Manila.

One the of the many monstrous and futuristic buildings around Osaka.

Love it! Spotted this guy with fans in his shirt waiting for our train to the airport. Only in Japan!