Saturday 7 May 2011

Wrapping Up Osaka

Most of today was spent doing one of two things, either preparing to leave our hostel tomorrow, or exploring more of Den Den Town. (post of first visit)

Matt had mentioned that the dryers weren't amazing, so we had strung up some ad hoc clotheslines, and had laundry hanging basically from every possible place.
This picture doesn't show it at its worst, where we had things hanging from the bedframe, the rail for the bed's curtains, every hangar in the hostel, every rung of the ladders to climb to the upper bunks, and even my pyjamas hanging off the lockers.

Den Den Town yielded additional bounties this time around, as we explored places we didn't get a chance to last time.
A kid's ride, featuring One Piece characters Luffy D Monkey (straw hat) and Toni Toni Chopper (blue-nosed reindeer in pink top hat) on the Going Merry (boat). Look how happy they are.
We found a hobby store with an impressive selection of games. I recognized many of the titles, and found a game that I'd been looking for for a while called Hive. There is just something satisfying about buying a German game in Japan. Thankfully, the instructions were included in German, Japanese, and English.

I also bought the Carcasonne expansion Inns and Cathedrals, or as it appears on the box: "Wirtshäuser und Kathedralen". Its instructions are only included in German and Japanese, but it is a game I am already familiar with, and don't really need instructions anyway.

Matt and Bram are the big spenders in anime and gaming stores as well as the arcades, but I seem to be the sucker for board games, seeing as how I've bought 3 already (technically 2 and an expansion pack).

Another theme to our day was posing with any statues that we saw.

A Bleach rock musical. This caught my attention because there have been ads for some sort of Bleach musical all week on the TV.

A significant amount of shelf space is devoted to Vocaloid (note that this is the same series that the Diva arcade games are about). Hatsune Miku (the main character, blue hair) is a pretty big deal in Japan.

We had dinner at a Maid Cafe. They seem to be unique to Japan, and quite popular. All the waitresses dress up as maids and come to serve you when you ring a bell. The dishes are made with love. Bram ate his curry from a heart shaped bowl. Matt ordered a specialty dish, an omelette with a design lovingly drawn on request by the waitress. He requested a cat, but we got a rabbit instead; we are not entirely sure how that happened.

Photos were not allowed within the cafe, so just the one of the sign outside will have to suffice.

We found a store that sold Magic cards in Japan. Magic seems to be pretty obscure, overshadowed by YuGiOh, so this was a good find. Note some of the old sets available, including Chronicles, Ice Age, and even Unglued.

The original Starfox game. For the picture on the cover, they made puppets of each character, as computer graphics weren't good enough at the time to provide a good image.

A couple stores with really cool names. Astro-Zombies, and Yellow Submarine.

An impressively large game station (arcade). I like the pixelated Space Invader that they use as a logo.

There was a lot more that we saw today, but I must be going, so I'll leave you all with one of the strangest names for a drink that I have seen. Leave a comment if you think you have an explanation.

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