Enjoyable holiday is enjoyable; also, map of Kansai.
The most massive spring vacation ever continues! On Friday, after school, I hopped a train to Kyoto and met up with Gaia and Pizza (as ever, real names omitted, but for the sake of the family members following this blog, Gaia is the friend from California who came down to see my convocation the year before last; before we went off to Chicago to see the opening performance of "Play!") who were in Japan for a couple of days as a stopover on their way to Indonesia, where they were visiting Gai's relatives. They'd been in Tokyo for two days before arriving in Kyoto, and then moving on to Osaka.
Once again people fall victim to the "you said you lived in Osaka, so I guess Kyoto is very far away" trap.
(*resolves to add the 'trap' tag to Drew's 'stranded after last train' entry from last week*)
For those who've never seen a map of the Kansai area (and I don't expect many of you to have, really, seeing how it's ridiculously difficult to find maps of this country in English), Kyoto Prefecture and Osaka prefecture are located adjacent to each other. Here's a brightly-coloured map I borrowed from the METI-KANSAI homepage:
Osaka City is just west of the middle of Osaka Prefecture. Kyoto City is a little southeast of centre. The city where I live is to the extreme northwest of Osaka and located pretty much RIGHT on the border between the two prefectures. In many cases it is faster and/or easier for me to do my shopping in Kyoto. I could bike to Kyoto Prefecture in less than half an hour for sure. For those curious, Takarazuka is located in Hyogo Prefecture, to the west.
A prefecture is about the size of a very small state or province. Definitely smaller than Newfoundland, maybe about the size of P.E.I. It's no problem for me to get to Hyogo on the train in a bit over an hour; same with Nara, and it's half an hour to Kyoto or to Osaka City. I've never been to Wakayama but I suspect it could be done in about two hours. So now you know. :D
Keihanshin (京阪神) is a metropolitan region encompassing the metropolitan areas of the cities of Osaka in Osaka prefecture, Kobe in Hyōgo Prefecture, and Kyoto in Kyoto prefecture. The entire region has a population (as of 2000) of 18,644,000 over an area of 11,170 km². It is Japan's second most populated urban region after the Greater Tokyo Area, containing roughly 15% of Japan's population.
The GDP in this area (Osaka and Kobe) is $341 billion, making it one of the world's most productive regions, a match even for Paris and London.[2]
The name Keihanshin is constructed by extracting a representative kanji from Kyoto (京都), Osaka (大阪), and Kobe (神戸), but using the On-yomi (Chinese reading) instead of the corresponding Kun-yomi (Japanese reading) for each of the characters taken from Osaka and Kobe.
Anyway. I convinced Gai not to take the Shinkansen from JR Kyoto to Shin-Osaka, as that would take approximately 3 times as long to reach my place and cost a ridiculous amount. Instead I met them at Shijo Station and we went back together, dropped off luggage and chilled for a few minutes. Gaia had brought me presents: sweets and american snacks! (There goes my diet...again...) She truly knows the way to my heart. :P Then they told me that I was getting a belated birthday dinner and to choose a place. So we went to the Dotonbori (the only required sightseeing place for anyone who comes to Osaka) and had dinner in a okonomiyaki place I'd wanted to try for a while, then did karaoke and played Taiko before heading back.
The next day, I asked "what do you want to do?" and that we ended up in Den Den Town probably comes as a surprise to nobody. We hit the Daiso briefly before storing things in coin lockers, then went for lunch...to a maid cafe. Once again I'll pull Wikipedia information:
Cosplay restaurants (コスプレ系飲食店), are theme restaurants and pubs that originated in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan around the year 2000. They include maid cafés (メイドカフェ) and butler cafés (執事喫茶), where the service staff dress as elegant maids, or as butlers. Such restaurants and cafés have quickly become a staple of Japanese otaku culture. Compared with service at normal cafés, the service at cosplay cafés involves the creation of a rather different atmosphere. The staff treat the customers as masters and mistresses in a private home rather than merely as café customers.
When a person enters the café, the maids typically give an extraordinarily humble greeting, such as "Welcome home, Master" (お帰りなさいませ、ご主人様！) in order to play the role of a house servant. In order to enhance the illusion that the customer is indeed the master, they often serve the customer in a very deferential fashion. For example, staff sometimes kneel to mix sugar or milk in teas or other drinks. The purpose of the maid cafés and their service is to make customers feel as though they are at home and to encourage them to relax. Although exemplary customer service is typical of Japan, maid cafés take special care to pamper patrons.
Haha. I was too chicken to go in one previously, but somehow with Gaia and Pizza there it was easier. So we entered the cafe and it was staffed by four girls who welcomed us and seated us. Fortunately Gai and I were not the only female customers. I read the menu out loud to the others, to the best of my ability, and we all decided to have the special lunch sets, each of which seemed to have a different theme attached to it that I could not read the kanji for. Whatever. XD The first lucky maid who got to serve us poor non-Japanese speakers came over and immediately began talking to Gaia, who is Asian...but not Japanese. I took over the ordering for all three of us, but she continued to glance at Gai, seemingly expecting help. :P This happened more than once over the weekend, lol.
Anyway, after hacking our way through the order process (tea? will that be hot or iced? sugar or gum syrup? would you like milk? do you want it with your meal or before?), we came to the last item on the set, which I couldn't read on the menu. It said something about a special card. Apparantly we were supposed to choose one of the four maids working that day and get a special welcome card from her. Not knowing what to do, I chose the girl serving us...and of course Gaia and Pizza did too. We later realized that she had to hand-write and draw pictures on each of these cards. Oops. After that, another maid brought our drinks, and insisted that she add the milk and sugar syrup into our tea for us, haha. This maid's name was Ayara and she was quite proficient at English, it seemed. She told me she was an international student when she was in high school. She was super nice! She also insisted on putting the dressing on our salads for us. ^^;; Then we were handed off to another maid for our main meal, who looked frightened, and Ayara told her "ganbatte" - she had probably figured out that the three of us had barely enough Japanese ability to fill a thimble. Awesome. XD Lunch for me was doria, which is a rice dish topped with meat sauce (and a surprise egg!) and bechamel sauce and cheese, then baked. Delicious! Pizza had the same, and Gai had the pasta. Then Ayara brought over our dessert (strawberry shortcake and berry torte, respectively) and launched into her roleplay of the set theme, meaning she was very cute to me and Pizza (who'd ordered the doria set with the cute schoolgirl on the picture) and then got all haughty with Gaia (who had a 'tsuu' set featuring a scowling maid, lol). She realized that we had no idea what was happening, and helpfully explained. XD Then she asked us about hobbies and such, and I found out that she was a big Detective Conan fan. So we talked about the movies for a few minutes, and she promised that when she got to marry Kaitou Kid, I'd marry Heiji and we'd have a double wedding. XD I mentioned the ZARD concert so she asked about Giza artists I liked, and told me that Giza's studio was actually in Shinsaibashi here in Osaka. I'd known that some of the Giza artists were from Kansai (Kuraki Mai used to live in Kuzuha) but not that the studio was here. Neat! When I said I loved Aiuchi Rina, Ayara said she did too, especially Koi wa Thrill Shock Suspense. Not my favourite of Rina's songs by a long shot, but I still like it! I decided I'd make a karaoke request, which you could do for 500 yen. Ayara got up there and sang the song complete with the ParaPara dance moves. It was fantastic. XD Anyway, we lingered a while longer after that, but it was getting very late, so we said good bye and left the maid cafe.
After that we hit Super Potato and the game shops. In the Media Recycle Shop I bought a handful of loose Wonderswan Digimon games for ten yen each. (That's about 10 cents.) Big change from the way I paid $40 to import Digimon Medley on the WS for my nineteenth birthday. Luckily I brought my Wonderswan to Japan! Anyway, after poking around K-Books and Gundams Gundams and all, it started to get dark, so we had a bite at Mister Donut and then walked back to the coin locker in Namba. En route, I picked up two summer shirts at Uniqlo and had a cursory glance in Namba Parks for the Crocs I wanted to get, which the store did not have. So we took the train back to my place. After getting home, we ordered not Pizza Hut but Pizza-La, which wasn't bad at all. ^^ Then we watched some Digimon and Full Moon wo Sagashite before bed.
The next day we had to get ready for them to head off to Indonesia. Pizza and I carted a box of purchases to the post office and sent it back to the States so they wouldn't have to drag it around. Then we went to Tennoji, stored things in a coin locker, ate at a 27th floor Ganko with a view of Shinsekai, then returned to Tennoji to get the airport train. Usually I advocate the Keihan airport bus, but Gai-tachi had a JR Rail Pass and wanted to take a JR train. So I put them on the 2:30 airport express. I'd never taken the airport train before (well, I took it to Rinku Town, but not to the airport) but remembered that there was something wonky about it - the back half of the train split off after a certain station and went to Wakayama (see the map again!), and the front half continued to the aiport. Proud of having recalled this Very Important Fact in time, I stopped at the first lineup that had "airport" on its sticker (car 5) and put them on the train. After saying goodbye, the train doors closed and zoomed off. I lingered for a moment after, looking at the sticker which said "Haruka Airport Train"...wait a minute...Haruka? That hadn't been a Haruka train! I ran to the schedule board and discovered that there were actually TWO airport trains departing from Tennoji! And the second one, the Haruka that goes STRAIGHT TO THE AIRPORT, was just pulling in! Crap! And the stupidity didn't actually stop there! The sticker Gai had boarded at was car 5, and only the first 4 cars of the jr airport express would go to the airport - car 5 would go to Wakayama! AAACK!! I ran back to the schedule board and checked the stop list for Haruka; there was one stop en route to the airport where the Haruka would arrive before the Express, I thought to myself, "if I get on the Haruka, I can cut them off and make sure they're on car 4...wait...no...it only stops at that station after 7 o'clock PM! WHYYYYYY!" And then the Haruka closed its doors and left. Arrrgh. Instead, I went to the stationmaster and asked in broken Japanese if there would be an announcement on the train about the cars splitting up. I figured as long as they were listening, and it was in English, they would be okay...maybe... @_@ He said there would be an announcement in English and not to worry about it. When they heard it they could just walk forward one car. This did not entirely ease my fears but I had to accept it; no way could I catch the train before the Wakayama half broke off. I had to hope for the best and left Tennoji in a nervous fashion.
So nervous, in fact, that I got on the Loop Line going the wrong way.
I just saw the "Osaka" sign and got on an orange train and sat down. After about ten minutes I realized I had no idea where on earth I was or where the station we'd just passed should be on the line. I looked out to see Kyocera Dome. I'd never actually seen it in person, and concluded that I had boarded the southbound train instead of the northbound. Awesome. Well, it was a nice day and a good view. I took the loop the full way around and got off at JR Osaka Station. My iPod batteries had conked so I bought a 9v charger at Yodobashi Camera, then went out looking for some summer shoes. I hardly need to tell anyone what kind of shoes I wanted. Neither Plaza nor Loft had the silver Melindis ( http://www.get-crocs.co.uk/images/Crocs%20Malindi%20Cotton%20Candy.jpg ) in my size so I went to Senri-Chuo and got a pair of pink ones instead.
Came home and began the long process of cleaning up my apartment...didn't hear from Gaia, but she'd briefly popped into the chat around 3:30 (the time when the express would have arrived at the airport) and later she made an "I'm in Indonesia" blog post so I can hopefully conclude they did not miss their flight. Whew!! Thank goodness. x.x
Once again people fall victim to the "you said you lived in Osaka, so I guess Kyoto is very far away" trap.
(*resolves to add the 'trap' tag to Drew's 'stranded after last train' entry from last week*)
For those who've never seen a map of the Kansai area (and I don't expect many of you to have, really, seeing how it's ridiculously difficult to find maps of this country in English), Kyoto Prefecture and Osaka prefecture are located adjacent to each other. Here's a brightly-coloured map I borrowed from the METI-KANSAI homepage:
Osaka City is just west of the middle of Osaka Prefecture. Kyoto City is a little southeast of centre. The city where I live is to the extreme northwest of Osaka and located pretty much RIGHT on the border between the two prefectures. In many cases it is faster and/or easier for me to do my shopping in Kyoto. I could bike to Kyoto Prefecture in less than half an hour for sure. For those curious, Takarazuka is located in Hyogo Prefecture, to the west.
A prefecture is about the size of a very small state or province. Definitely smaller than Newfoundland, maybe about the size of P.E.I. It's no problem for me to get to Hyogo on the train in a bit over an hour; same with Nara, and it's half an hour to Kyoto or to Osaka City. I've never been to Wakayama but I suspect it could be done in about two hours. So now you know. :D
Keihanshin (京阪神) is a metropolitan region encompassing the metropolitan areas of the cities of Osaka in Osaka prefecture, Kobe in Hyōgo Prefecture, and Kyoto in Kyoto prefecture. The entire region has a population (as of 2000) of 18,644,000 over an area of 11,170 km². It is Japan's second most populated urban region after the Greater Tokyo Area, containing roughly 15% of Japan's population.
The GDP in this area (Osaka and Kobe) is $341 billion, making it one of the world's most productive regions, a match even for Paris and London.[2]
The name Keihanshin is constructed by extracting a representative kanji from Kyoto (京都), Osaka (大阪), and Kobe (神戸), but using the On-yomi (Chinese reading) instead of the corresponding Kun-yomi (Japanese reading) for each of the characters taken from Osaka and Kobe.
Anyway. I convinced Gai not to take the Shinkansen from JR Kyoto to Shin-Osaka, as that would take approximately 3 times as long to reach my place and cost a ridiculous amount. Instead I met them at Shijo Station and we went back together, dropped off luggage and chilled for a few minutes. Gaia had brought me presents: sweets and american snacks! (There goes my diet...again...) She truly knows the way to my heart. :P Then they told me that I was getting a belated birthday dinner and to choose a place. So we went to the Dotonbori (the only required sightseeing place for anyone who comes to Osaka) and had dinner in a okonomiyaki place I'd wanted to try for a while, then did karaoke and played Taiko before heading back.
The next day, I asked "what do you want to do?" and that we ended up in Den Den Town probably comes as a surprise to nobody. We hit the Daiso briefly before storing things in coin lockers, then went for lunch...to a maid cafe. Once again I'll pull Wikipedia information:
Cosplay restaurants (コスプレ系飲食店), are theme restaurants and pubs that originated in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan around the year 2000. They include maid cafés (メイドカフェ) and butler cafés (執事喫茶), where the service staff dress as elegant maids, or as butlers. Such restaurants and cafés have quickly become a staple of Japanese otaku culture. Compared with service at normal cafés, the service at cosplay cafés involves the creation of a rather different atmosphere. The staff treat the customers as masters and mistresses in a private home rather than merely as café customers.
When a person enters the café, the maids typically give an extraordinarily humble greeting, such as "Welcome home, Master" (お帰りなさいませ、ご主人様！) in order to play the role of a house servant. In order to enhance the illusion that the customer is indeed the master, they often serve the customer in a very deferential fashion. For example, staff sometimes kneel to mix sugar or milk in teas or other drinks. The purpose of the maid cafés and their service is to make customers feel as though they are at home and to encourage them to relax. Although exemplary customer service is typical of Japan, maid cafés take special care to pamper patrons.
Haha. I was too chicken to go in one previously, but somehow with Gaia and Pizza there it was easier. So we entered the cafe and it was staffed by four girls who welcomed us and seated us. Fortunately Gai and I were not the only female customers. I read the menu out loud to the others, to the best of my ability, and we all decided to have the special lunch sets, each of which seemed to have a different theme attached to it that I could not read the kanji for. Whatever. XD The first lucky maid who got to serve us poor non-Japanese speakers came over and immediately began talking to Gaia, who is Asian...but not Japanese. I took over the ordering for all three of us, but she continued to glance at Gai, seemingly expecting help. :P This happened more than once over the weekend, lol.
Anyway, after hacking our way through the order process (tea? will that be hot or iced? sugar or gum syrup? would you like milk? do you want it with your meal or before?), we came to the last item on the set, which I couldn't read on the menu. It said something about a special card. Apparantly we were supposed to choose one of the four maids working that day and get a special welcome card from her. Not knowing what to do, I chose the girl serving us...and of course Gaia and Pizza did too. We later realized that she had to hand-write and draw pictures on each of these cards. Oops. After that, another maid brought our drinks, and insisted that she add the milk and sugar syrup into our tea for us, haha. This maid's name was Ayara and she was quite proficient at English, it seemed. She told me she was an international student when she was in high school. She was super nice! She also insisted on putting the dressing on our salads for us. ^^;; Then we were handed off to another maid for our main meal, who looked frightened, and Ayara told her "ganbatte" - she had probably figured out that the three of us had barely enough Japanese ability to fill a thimble. Awesome. XD Lunch for me was doria, which is a rice dish topped with meat sauce (and a surprise egg!) and bechamel sauce and cheese, then baked. Delicious! Pizza had the same, and Gai had the pasta. Then Ayara brought over our dessert (strawberry shortcake and berry torte, respectively) and launched into her roleplay of the set theme, meaning she was very cute to me and Pizza (who'd ordered the doria set with the cute schoolgirl on the picture) and then got all haughty with Gaia (who had a 'tsuu' set featuring a scowling maid, lol). She realized that we had no idea what was happening, and helpfully explained. XD Then she asked us about hobbies and such, and I found out that she was a big Detective Conan fan. So we talked about the movies for a few minutes, and she promised that when she got to marry Kaitou Kid, I'd marry Heiji and we'd have a double wedding. XD I mentioned the ZARD concert so she asked about Giza artists I liked, and told me that Giza's studio was actually in Shinsaibashi here in Osaka. I'd known that some of the Giza artists were from Kansai (Kuraki Mai used to live in Kuzuha) but not that the studio was here. Neat! When I said I loved Aiuchi Rina, Ayara said she did too, especially Koi wa Thrill Shock Suspense. Not my favourite of Rina's songs by a long shot, but I still like it! I decided I'd make a karaoke request, which you could do for 500 yen. Ayara got up there and sang the song complete with the ParaPara dance moves. It was fantastic. XD Anyway, we lingered a while longer after that, but it was getting very late, so we said good bye and left the maid cafe.
After that we hit Super Potato and the game shops. In the Media Recycle Shop I bought a handful of loose Wonderswan Digimon games for ten yen each. (That's about 10 cents.) Big change from the way I paid $40 to import Digimon Medley on the WS for my nineteenth birthday. Luckily I brought my Wonderswan to Japan! Anyway, after poking around K-Books and Gundams Gundams and all, it started to get dark, so we had a bite at Mister Donut and then walked back to the coin locker in Namba. En route, I picked up two summer shirts at Uniqlo and had a cursory glance in Namba Parks for the Crocs I wanted to get, which the store did not have. So we took the train back to my place. After getting home, we ordered not Pizza Hut but Pizza-La, which wasn't bad at all. ^^ Then we watched some Digimon and Full Moon wo Sagashite before bed.
The next day we had to get ready for them to head off to Indonesia. Pizza and I carted a box of purchases to the post office and sent it back to the States so they wouldn't have to drag it around. Then we went to Tennoji, stored things in a coin locker, ate at a 27th floor Ganko with a view of Shinsekai, then returned to Tennoji to get the airport train. Usually I advocate the Keihan airport bus, but Gai-tachi had a JR Rail Pass and wanted to take a JR train. So I put them on the 2:30 airport express. I'd never taken the airport train before (well, I took it to Rinku Town, but not to the airport) but remembered that there was something wonky about it - the back half of the train split off after a certain station and went to Wakayama (see the map again!), and the front half continued to the aiport. Proud of having recalled this Very Important Fact in time, I stopped at the first lineup that had "airport" on its sticker (car 5) and put them on the train. After saying goodbye, the train doors closed and zoomed off. I lingered for a moment after, looking at the sticker which said "Haruka Airport Train"...wait a minute...Haruka? That hadn't been a Haruka train! I ran to the schedule board and discovered that there were actually TWO airport trains departing from Tennoji! And the second one, the Haruka that goes STRAIGHT TO THE AIRPORT, was just pulling in! Crap! And the stupidity didn't actually stop there! The sticker Gai had boarded at was car 5, and only the first 4 cars of the jr airport express would go to the airport - car 5 would go to Wakayama! AAACK!! I ran back to the schedule board and checked the stop list for Haruka; there was one stop en route to the airport where the Haruka would arrive before the Express, I thought to myself, "if I get on the Haruka, I can cut them off and make sure they're on car 4...wait...no...it only stops at that station after 7 o'clock PM! WHYYYYYY!" And then the Haruka closed its doors and left. Arrrgh. Instead, I went to the stationmaster and asked in broken Japanese if there would be an announcement on the train about the cars splitting up. I figured as long as they were listening, and it was in English, they would be okay...maybe... @_@ He said there would be an announcement in English and not to worry about it. When they heard it they could just walk forward one car. This did not entirely ease my fears but I had to accept it; no way could I catch the train before the Wakayama half broke off. I had to hope for the best and left Tennoji in a nervous fashion.
So nervous, in fact, that I got on the Loop Line going the wrong way.
I just saw the "Osaka" sign and got on an orange train and sat down. After about ten minutes I realized I had no idea where on earth I was or where the station we'd just passed should be on the line. I looked out to see Kyocera Dome. I'd never actually seen it in person, and concluded that I had boarded the southbound train instead of the northbound. Awesome. Well, it was a nice day and a good view. I took the loop the full way around and got off at JR Osaka Station. My iPod batteries had conked so I bought a 9v charger at Yodobashi Camera, then went out looking for some summer shoes. I hardly need to tell anyone what kind of shoes I wanted. Neither Plaza nor Loft had the silver Melindis ( http://www.get-crocs.co.uk/images/Crocs%20Malindi%20Cotton%20Candy.jpg ) in my size so I went to Senri-Chuo and got a pair of pink ones instead.
Came home and began the long process of cleaning up my apartment...didn't hear from Gaia, but she'd briefly popped into the chat around 3:30 (the time when the express would have arrived at the airport) and later she made an "I'm in Indonesia" blog post so I can hopefully conclude they did not miss their flight. Whew!! Thank goodness. x.x