Arriving and Getting Lost in Osaka

Hello from Osaka!!!

So, after a total of 15 lovely hours on a bloody plane, we arrived in Japan! Fortunately, from the airport, we only had to take a train to meet our housing agent who drove us to our apartment. Also, we travelled with 3 other people that will be in our training group, 2 of which are another couple and shared our train ride. After we got all moved in we decided to go check out the local corner store where we walked around aimlessly trying to figure out what was what, when one of the clerks decided he'd had enough fun watching us and started talking to us in English... so it was great to have someone tell us what the hell we were buying, and it was tasty!!!

Now, the apartment... when you think of Japanese housing what do you think of? Tiny, clean and... as everyone's told me... tiny. But, our apartment is actually quite spacious and very nifty!! It has a huge bed, in between a queen and king (oh and mom, the mattress is the same size, so the queen size sheets don't fit!!) We have a pretty big living room with a futon (ie. come visit and stay here!!!) and then there's the shower room... it's an entire room dedicated to a shower!! Getting water everywhere and not worrying about it is absolutely amazing... then there's the "dipping bath" where you can just sit and chill out in lots of water... haven't used it yet... may be a cramped fit. Our toilet is hilarious yet oh so economically and eco-friendly! You wash your hands with the water that goes into the tank for the next flush!!! I was pretty impressed with that.

Okay, now I'll stop talking about our apartment and get to the fun stuff... our mad walking trip!

We slept like crap last night... woke up about four times and stayed up at 6AM here... 5PM is what our bodies thought it was. So we got ready and headed out the door to see what we can figure out about our little neighbourhood... naively thinking we could find our way back. HA!

After a big loop, we decided to check up some small streets and see where they led, then find a main street and see where that would take us... well after about 20 minutes into this I decided I could have been in Tokyo and not known the difference... but we kept travelling. Oh, we also had a map that our housing agent gave us of how to find things around us.... too bad the map was an utter piece of garbage and North was South and East was West... unbelievable!!! Well, that just made things worse and since we didn't find this out until the end of our travels and since we still wanted to figure things out, we kept on truckin'.

We wandered around a main street for a bit (but to be honest you couldn't tell, I was expecting such a different city scape than what was offered), we decided to just get groceries (our secondary objective) and take a cab back to our place. This is where we found out our map wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.


Well, that's been our first few hours here so far. It's 11:30 AM and we're already tuckered right out... but since we have to wait here from 2-9 for one of our bags to be delivered, we may as well nap and chill and just plain relax!! One of us may be on msn too since we're stealing the internet from someone around here so holler at us!

Well, see ya later!!!

Scott and Jo