Osaka - The beginning

Minasan, Akemashite omodeto gozaimasu
Happy New Year kids,

Hope 2008 has treated you all well so far. Well, my next few posts will cover my past week partying and eating in Osaka. Before I talk about Osaka though, I must tell you a little side story before I left.

Well, figuring that my Japanese was still too crap to even book a taxi to take me to the train station, I decided to enlist the help of my supervisor (sensei I call him) at the BOE (Board of Education) instead, plus I needed to give him the Christmas present that Sarah had sent him. As per Asian tradition, all the staff were busily cleaning before the New Year arrives, when I strolled in. I gave him the present and he was so pleased that he offered to drive me to the strain station ... beauty, problem solved. He then proceeded to ask me how long I would be in Osaka for, told him that I would be there for a week. He then looked at me, and with an uncomfortable laugh, he said "Osaka is very dangerous". Now, I had read that indeed Osaka is the where the Yakuza now mainly congregate. But "NO", his reason for it being dangerous was because there were many "Gay Bars" in Osaka. Mmmm, I thought ok ... so how would that be dangerous to me, not to mention how my sensei knew of this very interesting fact??? Dangerous gay bars - will the people in the gay bars try to rob me? Will they want to drag me in and do nasty things to me? Will they charge me lots of money to have them sit next to me and wipe my beer glass (thats what they do in hostess bars)? or will there be transsexual bars where the women are actually men??? So with that last thought, off I went to Osaka.

Firstly, the night bus to get to Osaka ... about a 10hr trip with little expectation of much sleep. We (I should mention that I was taking this trip with Holly and Matthew - fellow JET ALTs) were the last stop to be picked up. Such was the amount of people heading off to Osaka, that there needed to be three night buses. I got lucky number three. Fortunate enough to get to seats to myself, however the trade-off was that it was next to the toilet ... and any dreams of getting some decent shut eye were dashed with passengers frequenting the dunny to relieve themselves ... ehh, about everyone hour. Luckily the toilet didn't smell enough to make me pass out, which wouldn't have been so bad as I would have got some sleep at least.

We arrived at about 9.30 in the morning, a little sleep deprived, except for Holly, who apparently slept like a baby. Had nothing to do with the several sleeping tablets she took before getting on the bus. Regardless, we were excited to finally be in Osaka and ready to explore.

After checking into our hotel, our first destination was the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan, which holds of one the largest fish tanks in the world and houses a whale shark (wikipedia said it housed 3 whale sharks, I only saw one ... the others must have been in the sushi bar next door!).

This is a typical hotel room in Japan, just like a small hole in the wall. It was comfy and cheap though.

This is the entrance leading up to the Aquarium

On this day that we were visiting the Aquarium (and prolly throughout the winter season), they were putting on special penguin parades with the Emperor penguins (for those who aren't in the know about penguin species, these are the great big penguins, maybe about half my size - also watch "March of the penguins"). They were paraded to the adoring Japanese, photo snap happy, crowd 3 times a day. We happen to get there just as a parade was about to start.

This was the crowd that were waiting for the penguins to march by, hoping to catch a glimpse of these wild animals. The Aquarium wall is also in the background

Here are the penguins. Poor buggers waiting to have the whips cracked on them to march from one holding area to the next.

Next is a clip of the penguins, doing some parading. If you do not like animals being paraded around inhumanely just for the entertainment of humans, please look away now!

Now, I've never been into an aquarium before, so not sure if the layout is the same as in all of them. But the one in Osaka is split into different ocean zones around the world, displaying the different types of sea dwelling creatures that live there. I can't remember the different zones, so you'll just have to look at my pictures at random.

The entrance into the aquarium itself.

A pacific whitesided dolphin at play. I'm glad to report that no animals were harmed in the making of this blog, especially the dolphins!

The Emperor penguins in their rightful enclosure. Believe it or not, they actually created snow falling, so these guys could feel more at home.

Now this was really odd. These guys just swam inn the same spot, staring upwards. Its like one of this things were if you see a group of people looking up, you also look up. "Steve, do you see it?", "No, I can't it Fred", "Dah, guys, what are we looking for again?" - maybe what the fish were saying to each other.

These guys are the Porcupine fish (not to be confused with pufferfish, apparently). I tried really hard to make these guys angry, so the would blow up into a ball. Just didn't happen.

This is the oddly shaped Sun fish. Looks like its had half its body eaten! No Japanese jokes here!

The main attraction at the Kaiyukan - The Whale Shark! You can see a clip of the whale shark by clicking on this

These here are spider crabs. These things are seriously BIG! They can grow to a leg span of 4m and weigh 20kgs. These ones here weren't that big but still big enough.

This is ones of the many fluorescent jellyfish. Strange but pretty cool looking.

This was a Ferris wheel nearby, so what better to check out the whole city and bay of Osaka than to get on something that can take you up really high.

View of Osaka from the highest point on the Ferris wheel.

Enjoy