Sumo in Osaka

Our train to Osaka left Nagoya station at around 8am so we left Nisshin at like 6:30!! torture!!!!!! but it wasn’t too bad – i slept most of the three hour train ride there. :-P mom and gramma stayed up to take photos all the way there.. after we arrived we crammed our backpacks into a coin locker at the station and then wandered around a little lost trying to get our bearings in the station. a helpful english speaking goodwill guide pointed us in the right direction and even gave us a little photocopied map of the exit we would be going out of! handy!!

first we walked around dottonbori area (the dottonbori river goes through the middle of it). there are a lot of shops all nestled nicely in covered walkways. we had breakfast at starbucks of all places! …they’re everywhere – pointless to resist!! i’m pretty sure we ventured into the shinsaibashi area, but i’m not really sure. we were just wandering pretty aimlessly – zigzagging our way through the streets. there were a lot of clothing stores and miscellaneous goofy shops but nothing super marvellous or outrageous. of course we took photos of the gigantic “glico” neon sign. Glico is a foods company in japan (they make gum and drinks and ..stuff) and their giant sign is synonymous with osaka. and then we also rode a ferris wheel! got a nice view of the city.

And then it was off to SUMO!!!!! We specifically decided to hop over to Osaka just for the day because the sumo tournament was coincidentally happening while they were here. here’s the official website – in english and also available in japanese if you want to try to be authentic…or just confused. I had watched sumo last year in june in nagoya and had all sorts of fun. i hope that mom and gramma had just as much fun as i did. truth be told, i don’t know much of anything about sumo – some of the background history and the basic rules, but no players’ names or anything.. but i still enjoy watching!!

After sumo we walked around aimlessly trying to find somewhere that had appetizing (non-octopus related) food! and possibly an english menu. but that got frustrating and we ended up going into a little buffet style shop with a friendly waitress who strongly invited us in. gramma had some really tasty fish; mom’s wasn’t as good; and i wasn’t impressed. but it was food and not bad and filled us up.

After dinner we made our way back to our faithful train station and i asked to find out how to get to the appropriate train station to go to kyoto. we saved a bunch of money by going directly from osaka to kyoto. we took what i thought was the express train but turned out to be a packed local train (smae price). all of the trains were running behind – really unusual for japan!!! so we just took whichever one came first and that we could cram into. but there was no airconditioning and with a ton of people smashed in we all started sweating awfully quick!! gramma got to sit down about half way there which was definitely a good thing.. :-)

We arrived at kyoto station – which is quite huge!! and we were all pretty tired…. i remembered which exit the hotel was near so we made our way in that direction but soon discovered that no one actually had a map for where it really was!! hehhheeehehehh… thank god for japanese cell phones – i connected to the internet and we found it a few minutes later. Here’s the site we found it through: Hostelz.com.