Written: June 15, 12:27pm
I haven’t written an update on my life since last Friday morning! What a shame. I should definitely keep making it a point to reflect on my experience on a daily basis. That being said, here is my weekend update.
Friday I pretty much stayed at work until late at night, and then headed back home. I had dinner at home, dinner I bought at the convenience store, and then went to sleep. It was a very low key, nice day. If there were any exciting events this day, I can’t remember now, one important reason to write every day.
Saturday I slept-in and woke up at around 10am, I did laundry and cleaned up the apartment. One of the benefits of Japanese-sized (i.e. small) apartments is that you can vacuum them completely in less than 20 minutes. It was great. After doing laundry and cleaning up the apartment I decided that I wouldn’t spend the entire day at home, so I ventured out to Umeda Station (Osaka) and then walked around the streets there. It was great to just walk around and see the nightlife starting out and developing. It’s quite a lively area at night there. I was tempted to just stay there all night and take a train home in the morning (as many people do) but I had quite an interesting day coming up and I needed to get a good night’s sleep.
For dinner Saturday I had the magnificent experience of having an Okonomiyaki! I must say, that was one tasty meal. Okonomiyaki is known to be a specialty of Osaka, so I wanted to try it for a while now. While exploring the Umeda Station area I walked across this place that was called something that started with “O”, I took out my iPhone and typed “Okonomiyaki” in the Japanese keyboard to see how I would write it using Chinese characters too (in Kanji) and what came out was “お好み焼き” which was how the store name started! I walked in, excited, and asked for a ‘deluxe’ okonomiyaki. When I had that one Okonomiyaki I thought I was tasting something made in heaven. So delicious! You can see a picture of my halfway done Okonomiyaki on my facebook pictures posted here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2086637&id=712370&l=9f88aaa6d8
That was the highlight of my Saturday. Sunday I woke up at ~9:00am and took the 10:00am train in the Kobe direction. I was fortunate enough to experience a Japanese Tea Ceremony, which was quite interesting. A very unique ceremony, and it was quite crowded. There were two ceremonies performed before I could actually take part of one because they have a limit of 25 people per ceremony, and there were many more people there. Women were walking around in their kimonos which were beautiful, and I (and the other men in the room) were wearing suits. Women that did not own a kimono were wearing very pretty dresses.
After the tea ceremony I went to Kobe and visited a few mansions (European style) and saw a lot of great things. I would go into detail explaining what I saw, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have over 100 pictures uploaded to facebook for your enjoyment. I wouldn’t want to write 1000 words for each picture, imagine that.
Just to reiterate, the link to the pictures is here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2086637&id=712370&l=9f88aaa6d8
Please take a look!
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