Eastern Exploration

Observations from Osaka

· There is a really incredible amount of assistance for blind people. The main city streets of every place we’ve stopped have had ridged tiles to create pathways, and I’ve even seen maps in Braille and special stations to provide audio directions. And yet the number of blind people hasn’t been all that much greater than you’d expect.

· Chocolate covered yams. The fact that they exist here is just… special.

· Sitting here on the shinkansen, I’ve been somewhat distracted by the middle-aged man sitting across the aisle who’s been spending the ride flipping through porn. Nothing too hardcore, just nude photos, but it’s not like he’s trying to hide it either. Nobody else seemed the least bit fazed.

· I’ve developed a pretty low opinion of Japanese attempts at foreign food. One restaurant we tried, The Lockup, had cute-but-cheesy vampire/dungeon deco and served us omelettes and potatoes that were almost inedible. Another place served “French toast” that was perfect except for the lack of any egg in the toast. A third gave us “pad thai” that was also missing only one ingredient—the pad thai peanut sauce. I think if you want good international food, you’ve got to go five star.

· Hospitality here is really, really amazing. When we were in Arita, one of the galleries we stopped at had such amazing pieces that we had to buy something, so we picked out the most affordable ones we could find. The staff sat us down, showed us catalogs, served us coffee and Belgian chocolate, and then proposed to drive us to our next destination. When we went to a neighborhood post office in Fukuoka to ship those same ceramics, the postal worker spent at least 20 minutes and an inordinate amount of effort to help us package them up safely for shipping, in spite of the fact that they don’t offer packaging services. The next day, when we stopped in to use the ATM, he rushed out and presented us with cute little decorative charms as a gift. When we arrived at the train station in Osaka to go to Nara, the ticket-taker not only advised us on several options for the quickest trip, but later ran after us downstairs to tell us that an express train had just arrived by surprise. Likewise, when we wandered into a shrine near the landmark Shofukuji temple, a young man came out of nowhere to show us around and waited very patiently as we peered at all the beautiful religious ornaments and Anja did some praying. We thought we were on our way out the door, but then his mother invited us into a side room to serve us tea with delicious bean cakes. Every time we come into a restaurant, the entire staff welcomes us, and whenever we leave, they all bow and thank us for coming. When we were at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and Anja left her entry chit at a rest-area bench, someone grabbed it and ran after us to make sure we didn’t lose it. That pattern has been repeated a number of times—in Osaka, we would have lost a set of headphones and a CD player at the videogame arcade, except that someone put it in the lost-and-found for us to pick up the next day. We are constantly impressed.

· Osaka was described by the guidebook as an industrial city, but our local contact Yoshi insisted that it was the laid-back, Los-Angeles style counterpart to the businesslike Tokyo. I’ve noticed a great deal of alternative fashion, a great many interesting and beautiful modern buildings, a lot of customized cars, and a frustratingly frequent lack of downstairs escalators. I’m afraid to say that we started out with a rather negative impression of the place, thanks to a taxi driver at the shinkansen station who lost two of our three bags out the back of his trunk as he sped off in a hurry. (Needless to say, we switched cabs.) But we had a wonderful time that evening out at dinner and karaoke with Yoshi, and the following day we went to see an excellent traveling exhibit of Mucha’s art at a museum in town.

posted by Noah Flower @ 5:48 PM