Antoine hasn’t been feeling great the last couple of weeks. He’s had some minor health problems, his computer croaked on him, and he’s also starting to feel a bit homesick. We cooked up the idea a week or so ago that we’d go into Osaka, find a Mexican restaurant, and eat some spicy food to remind us of home.
I met Antoine in Umeda near a car display in the Hankyu station entrance. The Hankyu station is visually the most impressive of the stations in Osaka – it’s built into part of a shopping plaza, and the architecture and layout are a lot of fun.
First thing I wanted to check out was a place called Joyopolis near the station. It is an arcade/amusement park sponsored by Sega. We walked across the street but had trouble tracking it down. We ended up asking some employees in the lobby of the shopping center we were searching. Before I could ask in Japanese one of the employees asked me in English if he could help us. I realized that he was a foreigner – maybe European. He had blue eyes – something I haven’t seen in a long time. They were so strikingly blue that Antoine and I later conjectured that he was actually a robot – some kind of weird Osaka AI experiment. He creeped us out a little.
Anyway, he told us what we wanted was on the eighth floor, so we went on up, and then walked around the amusement area. There were little booths were you paid 500-600 yen and then walked through “Virtual Reality” exhibits. We ponied up for Terminator 3, which turned out to be pretty strange.
First, the guy asked us if we spoke Japanese, and I told him that we only spoke a little. He got a worried look on his face, and then asked us to wait outside. He ducked into a little room, and popped out two minutes later in full military gear and a gun. It was a little shocking, but he had us stand up straight, salute, and promise that we wouldn’t hurt anyone. His English was broken but quite good.
We walked in, and there were a number of cheesy things in there – a broken mannequin on the floor that was supposed to be the last people that went through, and a couple of robots that shot “bullets” of compressed air across the dark room. The best part by far was the cheesy acting by our guide – I’m sure it was more compelling in Japanese, but he did his best in English, and we were laughing pretty hard. At one point he tried to say “fuck” in English, but pronounced it wrong, and so with all the “bullets” flying by and the robots bouncing around we taught him how to pronounce it correctly.
At the end some poor employee dressed up in an alien suit chased us down the hallway towards the exit. Very cheesy, but I think I got my money’s worth of entertainment. We decided to forgo some of the other rides – although some names were pretty good. There was a bingo parlor that looked interesting, and a giant room full of print club picture machines. You could even rent strange costumes to wear while the pictures are taken. I tried to get Antoine to rent the French maid outfit, but he wasn’t going for it.
We took the subway from their to Shinsaibashi, and our first landmark – Bar, Isn’t It? Above that bar was one that was open, so we went in there to have a couple of beers and get our bearings. After chatting for an hour or so and drinking Coronas, we headed over to the Mexican restaurant, and found it closed. Ouch.
We did a quick check for another place, and found one called Ola Tacos that sounded promising. After a ten minute walk we found it – and it was closed too. It seemed like a bad time to close – Saturday night was jumping.
We were pretty bummed, so we ended up going to an Italian place for pizza. We ordered up two pizzas, and enjoyed an atmosphere strangely reminiscent of Bucca Di Beppos back in California. The pizza was a little plain, but tasty enough.
We left the place still hungry though, so we went back to Umeda station and found a little place there to eat yakisoba. I ordered a beer, but Antoine was trying to rehydrate and he ordered water. The older lady that was helping us gave him a look of disapproval, and then gave him a tiny glass of water from a big bottle that they had there. He drank it in one gulp, waited about five minutes and asked for some more. They glared menacingly at him, and said that they only had tea, trying to sell him a can of tea. The bottle that they poured from was still right there, but they were getting greedy on us. Antoine insisted on water, and so they poured him some from the tap – and set it down in front of him. We decided to pay up and leave – we weren’t feeling very welcome there so we split.
Antoine is going to a car show on Sunday, but he was bummed because he still doesn’t have a camera. It’s a big car show, one that he’s really excited about, so I loaned him my camera for the show. He was really happy, and I think that seemed to cheer him up the most of the whole night. I’m going to have to come up with another camera for my trip to Kyoto on Wednesday, but Kyoto will be there all the time, and the car show only comes once a year.
We split up from there and on the way home I bumped into Chris Yapp, an ALT that I know – he lives in the next town over. He was coming back from an Iron Maiden concert in Osaka, and so he told me all about that. He’s from Hawaii originally, so he’s having a tough time dealing with the cold weather around here. Chris said that he’s sticking around for year two, so we might have a chance to see a show together in the future sometime.
