Couchsurfing in Osaka

After spending the night at Kansai airport we took the train to meet our CS host on the suburbs outside of Osaka. The train filled up quickly with Japanese school kids in uniforms. It was early in the morning and we were still tired and hungry. Leia bought a lemon muffin in Namba station when we changed trains.

Our host T met us at the station when we finally arrived. He is a Japanese student who likes to host people at his house: he had another couple of surfers staying in another room when we were. They were there first so we got a room with roll-up futons on the floor, which suited us just fine. He also likes Lady Gaga. He came with his bike and we dragged our feet after him carrying our huge bags. T lives in a pretty big house way out in the suburbs, so it's very quiet on a Saturday morning and the weather was nice and breezy - both nothing like Vietnam. The first thing we did after we got there was walk to the nearest convenience store to buy some bread and things for breakfast. When we returned we quickly ate, showered and went to sleep for a couple of hours.

T woke us up when he was about to leave the house, and we went out to Osaka Namba station to explore the downtown area. It wasn't quite sunset yet, but the Dotonbori street was already busy with many people walking along it to eat and shop. we stepped into a generic sushi chain restaurant for our first sushi combination in Japan, which was pretty good. We walked back and forth along that street and Guy tried some takoyaki - octopus balls with a creamy sauce fried in batter - topped with bonito flakes. It's an Osaka speciality but this stall must not have been very good. We resolved to prefer places that have a line of locals waiting. On the way back to the station we saw a tiny shrine covered in moss where people were pouring water onto the moss as they prayed.

We met T at Osaka central JR (Japan Rail) station at the agreed-upon time to go to dinner, even though we had recently eaten. We took the train to his neighborhood and then walked a long way - to the neighboring town, in fact. We then queued up outside a restaurant for about half an hour and bought a bottle of water from a vending machine while we were waiting.

Inside was running sushi! There was sushi on the conveyor belt for the taking and you could also order on some sort of touchscreen other kinds of sushi that then arrived to the table on the conveyor. You could self-serve yourself free water or tea. I gotta say, having no interaction with other people was pretty cool. We had a lot of sushi, and it was only about 100 yen per plate, which is why T likes to take guests there. I especially enjoyed the salmon-roe gunkan (with red caviar) and also the gourmet tuna nigiri. The nigiri is the "standard" type of sushi in Japan; they don't eat many rolls. The waitress counted our plates for us at the end and we had 21 between us - but she must have miscounted because we paid for 20, that is 60 shekels plus 8% tax.

On the way back to T's house we walked past a river and a park, where we joked that he dumps the bodies of the couchsurfers he doesn't like, and then we collapsed sleeping on the futons.