Osaka

Well yesterday was an adventure, we went to Osaka! We all met up at okamoto then took the train to umeada. The train ride wasn't too long maybe 40 mins ish or something like that. In the US when you go between cities you have long stretchs of nothing, this wasn't the case, it was buildings along the entire way, there wasn't a distinct line where one city ends and another begins. We get off at the station, and its much bigger then the one at Sannomiya, we get everyone situated (we traveled in a large group) and headed of to yodobashi electronic store.

Yodobashi is freaking huge! Imagine a best buy, fill it with twice as much stuff, then stack 5 more of them on top of each other. Oh man it had everything, an entire floor for cell phones, a floor for cameras (which everyone was so sure they were getting a better deal there but I dont think so), one for TVs, computer parts, and then one for video game and toys. The video game toy floor was crazy. They had hundreds of gundam models (even a 5 foot tall display by the enterance) and all of the kamen raider, sentai, transformers stuff you could ever imagine. I even found a model for the car voltron ( I forget what it was called in Japanese). I really wanted to buy a lot of the stuff there but it came down to, I don't want to carry it all day and I don't have that much room in my room for little nick nacks and I don't know how I would get it back to the states. But in the game section I found a DS stylus pen that I had wanted and lots of other cool things like the wii neo-geo fighting stick. Also today the newest version of pokemon came out, platinum, came out so lots of kids had those paper burger king esc hats on but for the new pokemon in the game. In the cell phone section I found this really cool cell phone decale. It is the nerve logo in shiny metal and it looks really nice on my phone.

From there we decided to head off ot Osaka castle. We had a little adventure getting a big group of people from varrious stations on the subway but when we got there it was pretty breath taking. Osaka, like all of Japan, is very crowded but in the center is a giant park that the castle creeps up over the tree line. We walk for a while and see many really cool things that I took pictures of but when we finally get to the castle itself, it kind of takes you back how big it really is. The inside is actually a museum, which is still pretty cool. There were lots of things that made me wish I knew more about Japanese history because they had things like THE sword used by some famous samurai. The view from the top was pretty amazing, I took pictures but I dont know if they even do justice to have awesome everything was.

After words we headed back the way we came and got to the umeda stations. The problem with big groups happened as we ended up waiting half and hour because some one got seperated for some reason. I don't quite know two people were kind of taking over as leaders so I was just following along but even with cell phones we couldn't keep track of everyone. I started to read this manga I picked up for 105 yen at that book store and was really impressed with myself that if I don't worry about looking up every word I can have a pretty good reading comprehension. Eventually we all ended up in this shopping plaza and had some over priced food before going up to the ferries wheel.

The ferries wheel was also very awesome, my camera for some reason simply could not take usable pictures at all. It was really cool seeing Osaka from that angle at night, really amazing. From there I just headed back home, it took about an hour from station to station. It was a really cool day.