Daniel Flay.

Let me tell you about my mother (Part 2).

We spent most of the 22nd August walking around Osaka trying to find the Sky Tower…

I got this for breakfast.

I was a bit scared to just point at something on a menu after doing it a week previously and getting the worst meal ever, but it was pretty much just sweet and sour chicken, I think.

It’s completely mental how much you get out there for about a fiver. I only finished about 30% of my meals on that holiday.

We hit an arcade on the way to the Sky Tower for some Mario Kart.

But eventually we found the Sky Tower, somewhere near the Big Daddy burger mall place. It was huge, and weird-looking. It’s basically two skyscrapers connected by a bridge.

This is its lobby.

These are some views from 173 metres up…

It was supposed to be a ‘floating sky garden’ but there was no garden anywhere to be seen. The experience was ruined a bit by the shit music they were playing up there, and my bank calling to tell me they’d cancelled my card.

…saw a wedding…

…and took a picture of this awesome sign.

While looking for somewhere to eat we saw this love hotel.

£25 for a ‘rest’? Bargain.

We found a Taiko machine on the street. Playing it was a bad idea, as it made us very greasy.

Opposite the machine there was this…

It would’ve been great to try a few places out in Osaka, some of them looked weird as hell. Just… it was a bit darker than Tokyo and people here seemed to like us even less.

After trying to decide where to go for what seemed like a million years, we decided on this japanesey tapas place. It was probably the poshest place we went to the whole time, and they still managed to serve the worst food. The dessert I wanted was off, so I asked for the ‘Hokey Pokey Ice-Cream’, which turned out to be vanilla ice-cream with honey and cornflakes. Total bullshit.

We left it just too late to get the underground home, and had to walk back for quite a while. Which was kind of nice, I guess. Also, a few motorbikes went past and I told Paul about this documentary I’d seen about japanese biker gangs, and how you weren’t allowed to ride in big groups anymore. Just as I’d said it, a group of about 30 or more bikers went past, making a seriously loud noise. My camera wouldn’t load up in time to get a good enough photo though.

Let me tell you about my mother.

My computer’s been going mental recently and so I haven’t really used it. I saw something on Japan earlier and it reminded me that I haven’t updated my blog in forever, or finished writing about my holiday.

We got up kind of early on August 21st because we had to catch the Shinkansen to Osaka. I got a really expensive breakfast, considering it was just breaded chicken and barbecue sauce in sandwiches, some sushi and other things that looked too weird to eat. I got a half can/half bottle coke too.

It was like being in a plane. Before we were allowed to get on, train-hostesses kept us queuing while the train was cleaned and the chairs actually turned around automatically so we’d be facing in the right direction.

So, after sleeping for about two hours and going really, really fast, we eventually ended up in Osaka…

Because we were there at the weekend (I think) we were able to buy ‘No My Car Day’ passes, which meant we could get around super cheap.

Near the main station there was a super huge mall and we went to look for somewhere to eat…

Where would you go?

As it turned out, the burgers were nowhere near as big as the poster suggested, but they were tasty.

For dessert we checked out what the japanese love so much about coffee and cake at ‘Dear Café’ - I got two just in case we didn’t get the chance again. It was amazing.

We checked into a hotel…

…and went to the Osaka Dome. On the way I managed to put my hotel swipe-card into a machine on the underground instead of my No My Car Day card.

Probably the best thing about the game was the beer people. Paul took this super flattering photo of me with one of them…

…and then I managed to spill it over the people in front of me. They were not happy, even though I tried to apologise an insane amount. I thought about buying them a beer to say sorry, but they were total dickbags.

I’d never seen a game of baseball before and was told it would be crazily boring, but it wasn’t. Quite a lot happened, and the Hiroshima Toy Carp beat the Hanshin Tigers by some way (but lost the next two nights’ games). Ordering more beer was quite awkward though.

I seem to remember finding the rest of the night kind of weird as no-one seemed to want us in any of their bars. We went to a pirate-themed one, one where I had Red Bull and beer, and Bar Fun. Looking out of the window at Bar Fun (you had to take a lift up to it) was just like looking over Los Angeles in Bladerunner.

All I really remember from that night is getting separated from Paul and taking about two hours to find the hotel, even though I was about 5 minutes away from it.

I took these two pictures though…

Yoohoo, shitheads.

So I finally feel like I can blog again, after overcoming the insane depression I developed since leaving the best country in the world. The morning after the last blog post, I got a Mister Donut breakfast with iced coffee.

Since we were in Ueno, we went for a walk around Ueno park. It was very nice, but the heat was probably the most intense yet. Luckily there was a snowcone stall.

It was all really cultural and there were a lot of shrines and things…

…but it was a bit too hot to enjoy any of it.

After getting a bit lost, we went to Asakusa for a boat/spaceship ride.

We ended up in Odaiba, a huge artificial island they built in the 1850s.

It looks kind of like the torch is cut out of the top of the picture but it isn’t. You can see the Rainbow Bridge there and (if you look really close) the Eiffel Tower that they built a bit taller than the one in Paris.

They had some big event on, but it was impossible to tell what anything was about.

This woman was singing on the stage. I only managed to get one lame photo of her before I realised I wasn’t allowed to be taking photos.

Check out the security mascots at the top though.

You were supposed to pay to get in somewhere but we couldn’t find it. In a hall there were a load of people walking around but not really doing anything. There was a souvenir shop, people taking turns to fire a foam ball through a really small hoop, and a button you could press to make the number on a big display go up. We both pressed it.

They’re advertising this Richard Gere film a lot. It’s called Hachi and you can’t escape it. It seems to be about Rich hanging out with japanese businessmen and being friends with an akita.

Look closelier…

After walking around confused for a bit, we went to find a lifesize, moving model of a Gundam robot…

…but instead we ended up at Venusfort, a shopping mall that looked just like any other building from the outside, but Paul’s guidebook said it was worth a look - it totally was.

It was a bit of a shock walking in from really bright sunlight to night time in an italian town. I’m quite sure the ceilings began to turn to daylight as it got dark outside too. I got a disappointing, really expensive carbonara. I should’ve gone for the ‘neoporitan’ or ‘Bismalck’ pizzas they had on the menu. Next time…

So then we went to this car display place. I think you could test-drive cars around a this rollercoaster-type circuit they had.

They had a bunch of super fun, interactive display things too.

We hit the Hello Kitty Giant Sky Wheel after.

The view was nice but Hello Kitty’s voice, which spoke to you the whole 19 minutes, got a bit annoying after a while. We talked about what would happen if you just didn’t get off at the end and kept going around.

Afterwards, we went to a huge arcade. This girl made the virtual reality things looks like loads of fun, but they were shit. Maybe we shouldn’t have chosen the hang-gliding one.

We played baseball for £3 in this huge practice place where a big screen showed a guy throwing the ball at you, but then it would fire out of a machine near his hand. I even managed to hit the ball properly on the last go, and it felt good.

This place was probably in the top 10 greatest things I did on the holiday. I tried a realistic dog-walking simulator.

I walked an akita around a village, managing to escape evil kids on skateboards and an angry bulldog before my dog was eaten by crows.

My camera ran out of battery, but we did see the giant Gundam model. It wasn’t as big as I’d hoped anyways, and the area around it was closed so we couldn’t even see its face and laser eyes.

Back in Ueno, we got yakiniku - where you have a barbecue thing in the middle of your table and cook all the meat yourself.

It doesn’t even look that amazing but it really was. The beef was so soft and the marinade was genius.

Brits on tour.

On Wednesday morning we went to the shrine in Asakusa again. Most of my pictures were exactly the same but I got this one of backwards-swastika incense sticks…

…and this awesome sign.

After getting the gyoza meal-deal thing again, we checked into this awesome hotel in Ueno…

…and Paul discovered the magic of pachinko.

In a room where people were betting actual money on computer-generated horse races.

…and we went to Sunshine City again, although I`m not sure why.

Look at how tall it is, though!

We went to the planetarium on the 10th floor, it was too dark to take pictures but it was awesome. It was all in japanese but the woman kept talking about `brack holes`, and at one point the ceiling showed the sea opening up and some kayakers being sucked into it while the narrator screamed.

The first thing we saw in the aquarium were these guys…

…and an armadillo and a desert fox in the same enclosure. Genius.

We were late for almost everything but the sea-lion show. It was definitely the best one I`ve ever seen, but felt a bit lame that we didn`t get to the see the `Lovely Penguin March`. Next time…

On the way out you`re given torches to look around a really dark aquarium…

…which was different, but I couldn`t help but feel like I was being kind of a douche to the animals by shining a torch in their faces, so it wasn`t as great as a regular aquarium where they turn the lights on.

I couldn`t get a picture (it was too dark) but in one section they had `habitats` from around the world, where they`d put random mammals (like a squirrel in the South America one) into big fish tanks. Also there was a huge octopus kept in a tank only about three times its size.

The last line of this sign above the jellyfish tank hasn`t stopped being funny to me yet, for some reason.

The cuddly-toy octopus looked a lot nicer than the real-life one I`d seen a few minutes earlier…

At about 2200 we went to Kamiya bar, which has been selling Denki-Bran or `electric brandy` since 1880, when electricity was cool.

But they weren`t having any of it.
`NO!`
`Just one drink though.`
`NO! CROSE!`

So we got a bottle of it from the souvenir shop and drank it on the street, from the plastic cups the chicken-cartilage yakitori place has.

Me and Paul hit Ueno pretty hard afterwards…

…and I`m not sure exactly what happened but these are the only photos I took for the rest of the night.

I`m not sure if I`ll be able to update the blog before I get back to the UK in two days, but I`ll have a go. Thank you, people that actually read it.

100% pretty cool.

Sorry about not blogging for a while, the place hosting my pictures is lame but I sorted it out, I hope…

On Tuesday morning (ish) we went for a japanese curry, which is basically a load of pretty spicy sauce with some carrots in. Bit weird - I`m glad I got extra gyudon with it.

Then we went to Ginza, to the 100% Chocolate Cafe. Like anything in Japan, if it`s got some sort of theme, you can expect them to have seriously taken it to phase two.

So I was only slightly surprised/upset by their cheese and collagen flavoured chocolates.

I got chocolate cake and a fizzy chocolate-orange drink. My friend got a fizzy chocolate-banana-lime-mint flavoured drink. Both drinks were seriously foul, but the cake was pretty good.

I couldn`t tell you why but we went with `Cheese` and `Vanilla Spicy`.

I didn`t think the cheese would be like those Kraft cheese squares, but it was. I hate that stuff as it is, but it was way worse as chocolate for some reason. I tried to be clever and wash it down with my drink, but the drink was cold and kept the chocolate hard so I actually had to chew it.

Vanilla Spicy was really nice though, to be fair.

My friend went to an hour of Kabuki theatre (which also meant queuing up for an hour before it started), but…

I had to meet my buddy Paul for some beer, soy snacks and… fish.

The trouble without a picture menu or english translations is that sometimes you will order chargrilled chicken cartilage and chicken fat skewers.

After hiding my skewers in a bag (Paul ate all of his), we checked into a hotel.

They have these awesome drinks in Japan that are like Red Bull but way stronger. We drank some of those and went to Shinjuku.

We were harassed literally every five minutes by guys harassing us into either going to strip shows or having sex with french girls for 2000 yen.

It got really old really quickly. The only place we`d actually wanted to go was totally dead and we only had an hour left until the last train anyways.

On our way back we found this lovely place.

They didn`t actually sell owls or monkeys like the sign would suggest, but they did sell lots of puppies.

Here is a picture of my super spacious capsule and the cheapest bottled water ever. It had a great sticker but you can`t really see it.

Eat some chicken strips (like a boss).

I got out of the hostel super late and met my new pal to go to Sunshine City again, in the hope of finding the elusive place where you can pay money to stroke dogs.

But they turned the 10th floor, where it used to be, into an aquarium. Which is bullshit.

On the plus side, we did see a woman walking a monkey (wearing trousers) on a lead.

So went to Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku’s red light district, to try to find some pissed-up businessmen.

We didn’t find anything that dodgy, to be honest. There were a lot of love hotels, like loads of them, and a bunch of host and hostess bars.

Host/hostess bars are places you pay a dreamy host/hostess up to about 10 000 yen to hang out with you for an hour.

Fierce.

Lonely Planet said to go to this bar in this area where there’s a bunch of really, really tiny bars crammed into four alleyways.

I thought ‘GHETTO’ looked pretty good. There was one with a killer theme that my pal didn’t want to go into because she doesn’t really like heavy metal or wrestling.

There were a lot of cats around - this guy was a big hit with the people walking through and was awesome.

We then walked around for what must’ve been about an hour, looking for some dinner. A bit scared of insane table charges and bullshit prices, we settled for Shakey’s Pizza…

…and had a conversation about how bad pizza and massive glasses of cola are for you. I’d heard Shakey’s was pretty good and I wasn’t disappointed. The 50s american music was a genius touch.

By the time we’d finished it was getting dark and the amount of neon was insane. Here is a taste…

…since I’ll be going back and taking way more pictures next time.

We then went back to the bar that Lonely Planet had recommended. It turned out to be just a really, really small room up some stairs with a woman in it listening to a radio. The cover charge was eight quid, and drinks were eight quid each too so we left pretty quickly and found this sign while looking for another place to go…

Fuck their 1000 yen cover charge anyways.

We ended up in this ‘spanish’ bar, which was also basically just a room with a guy in it (and also the awesome cat from before).

Two customers ended up coming in too, one who brought some incredible peanut cookies from northern Japan. And there was no cover charge! I will definitely go back to this place.

Then I had to go and meet Dan since he’d had my baseball tickets delivered to his house. I wasn’t hungry at all so I pointed at a picture of something small - some fried chicken and gyoza that cost about three quid.

It turned out to not be so snacky. All that in the picture (and a beer) cost around eight quid. So awesome.

While writing this I found a place in Tokyo which lets you rent monkeys, slow loris and bats. I might check it out.

Night night x

So unladylike!

Yesterday it was seriously hot and actually sunny instead of just being humid and cloudy.

I was looking for somewhere to get breakfast when I found the Senso-ji temple by accident. It’s the oldest one in Tokyo.

You have to walk through a bunch of shops and restaurants and stuff to get to it. I got these awesome half sponge, half biscuit things with jam in.

Like a total douche, I didn’t take a picture of the outside of the actual temple but this is what the inside looks like.

I’d not read anything about Asakusa in any of the travel guides or anything, but it turns out it’s actually an awesome place.

I went to a ramen place for lunch and pointed at the one at the top of the menu that looked the most normal, and the waitress asked me ‘really?’

It looked totally normal, but it tasted so fucking bad. I managed to eat about a third of it but gave up because I’m pretty sure I was actually going to be sick.

The waitress told me it was natto flavour. Dan had told me it was the grossest thing in the world but I couldn’t imagine how anything could taste that awful.

Check out the video above this and look at the kid’s reaction when he finally eats it - that’s pretty much how I felt yesterday. It’s honestly making me feel lame just thinking about it now.

I got a Starbucks on the way back to the hostel and spent about two hours trying to find it in the insane heat. Some douche pointed in me in totally the wrong direction when I was about a minute away from it, too.

I met someone in town at the yakitori place again. We were going to go to this place that’s sold ‘electric brandy’ since 1880 (cultural) but it shut just as we found it.

So we went to this other place where you bought tickets from a vending machine and paid for drinks with the tickets.

I bought some drink and a croissant on the way home and managed to get in at 0030 or something. No-one in my room snored, it was great.