Ok, ok, ok. So I didn’t blog on Friday at work or even over the long weekend, and now I’m very behind. Blarg. Anyway, I have much to catch up on starting with New Year’s Eve.
Ah, New Year’s Eve. It was another glorious day spent in Osaka. We were out of the hostel by about 10AM and decided to go to McDonald’s for breakfast. There was one near our train stop, and we were curious to see what the menu was like. I got pancakes (yay!), but some of the more awkward things on the menu included a shrimp burger and tuna McMuffin. Oh, Japan! After we finished breakfast, we went to the Osaka park area. In the middle of the park is Osaka Castle. It’s on a hill and can be seen from quite a distance. I wish we could have seen it at night because I hear it’s a beautiful view…but alas. One of my favorite things about it was the stark contrast between old and new. When I say old, I don’t mean a few hundred years. It’s easy to think of something a few hundred years old as being “old” in the States since our country is so young, but Japan is such an ancient society. When walking up to the castle, it has this really old world feel to it, yet as I looked around, I saw skyscrapers, busy highways, hybrid cars, rumbling trains, and other modern technology and architecture that you’d see in any other large city. (The castle was rebuilt, but I’m pretty sure that the walls are original.)
Japanese castles are very much different from European castles. European castles are big, thick, and gray whereas Japanese castles are much more ornate and decorative. The architecture isn’t as thick and clunky as European castles. We experimented with “Japanese carney” food at the top of the hill. Isn’t is just like a capitalist society to put tourist shops and food beside a national landmark? 
Ian shopped and bought a shirt, and while I would have liked to stay and look around in the shop, it was very crowded. Outside, Rachel and I split a mochi stick. Mochi is sweet rice that has been pounded to the point of becoming a glue like ball. It sounds horrible, I know, but it’s very good!
As we were leaving the castle, some guy passed by us on a bike, stopped, and asked where we were from. When we said “America,” it was like it completely made his day. He wanted to shake each of our hands multiple times and get pictures with us. It was a little strange, and we all made sure that we had our wallets afterward, but I guess some people are just really excited to meet foreigners!
Our next stop of the day was the train station to make our way to Kobe. You might have heard of Kobe before for a few reasons, one of them being Kobe beef. Kobe beef is a delicacy in the States. It’s very expensive but an extremely good cut of meat. We would have liked to try it, but it was a little out of our price range. We agreed to eat “generic Kobe beef”. Instead of eating the expensive Kobe beef, we would eat beef in Kobe. ha ha. David wanted to meet up with some of his Japanese friends, Ayumi and Hiromi, in Kobe and said we could tag along if we wanted to. Ayumi and Hiromi were really nice, and it was a pleasure to meet them! I don’t remember the name of it, but we went to the foreigner houses in Kobe. The houses are American colonial or Victorian, and although no one lives in the houses, it’s a really trendy part of town.
We were all a little chilled after being outside for so long, so we stopped at a Starbucks for coffee and tea. Plus, we had a little time we wanted to kill before going to a prison themed restaurant called “The Lockup”. It was such a fun restaurant! It was in the basement, and as you walked in, the walls looked like a jail cell, and the Prison Break theme song played. There were three doors to choose from, but luckily we chose the right one. The hostess (dressed as a prison guard) asked us which person is the worst in our group, to which everyone said “Ian!” 
She asked again, and Ayumi said it was probably her. The hostess “arrested” Ian and Ayumi and placed them in handcuffs. She led them and us to our table, which looked like a jail cell. Some of the other rooms were complete with iron bars, but unfortunately ours didn’t have them. The servers were dressed in white and black prison uniforms. The atmosphere of that place was awesome as was the food! Our meals came with a drink, and they had really crazy prison concoctions. Ayumi got one that had multiple vials and a beaker for mixing. Ian’s had crazy green things that looked like bugs floating in his, and David’s came with a syringe so he could inject whatever the red was into his beaker. We all ordered something to eat and split it.
During dinner Justine text me to say that she hoped we were having a good time. I said yes and asked her what she was doing for New Year’s Eve back in Kuma-gun. She said that she had just dropped her mom off at the airport and was going home. I told her that she should just come up to Osaka and spend the new year with us! We went back and forth a bit, but she agreed to do it! With the help of the shinkansen (the high speed train), she was in Osaka in three hours. She literally came with the clothes on her back, lol. We were able to get her into the same room in our hostel. Once we got settled, we went out for New Year’s Eve.
We didn’t have formal plans, but we ended up in the Times Square of Osaka. Once again, I don’t remember the name of the place, but it is a famous area of Osaka, and it was PACKED. We were on a little bridge over a little river, and there were so many people on the bridge that we could feel it move. 
People kept coming up to us and asking where we were from. Most of them were drunk, but when we said America, they got really excited and started talking to us. One NYE tradition was a little weird for us. Guys were jumping off the bridge. It may have been alcohol, peer pressure, a demonstration of masculinity, or a combination of the three, but we always knew when someone had jumped because people started shouting and screaming. One thing that we really missed was the significance of midnight. We were expecting a countdown, fireworks, confetti, SOMETHING to acknowledge that it was midnight, but the only way we knew the new year had begun was that someone set off a party popper. Ian and I kissed, and so 2012 had begun!
We wandered around the streets for a bit before deciding to go to an izakaya (Japanese style pub) for late night drinks and greasy food. When we got back to the hostel around 3AM, we crashed.
PS- I tried something new this time. I included pictures for a visual reference! Ian always gets on my case about not using pictures in the blog, but usually I don’t put the pictures from my camera on my computer until long after I’ve blogged about the event. However, this time I actually have them, so enjoy!
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