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Published: September 11th 2006
I think we promised pictures for this next entry and we definitely have some to post, but we have about 45 minutes before we have to leave our Guesthouse so I don't think I have time to resize them all and post them. In Osaka we'll have to find a McDonalds and buy a drink and sit and surf for awhile. It's so neat how all the fast food restaurants have plug ins at the tables and wifi hotspots (internet).
We have decided that temples are not really our cup of green tea. A lot of the temples in Japan are restored too, so some of them are as recent as 1960's or 1970's! We tried to see as many free ones as we could, but considering we are on such a strict budget and the trains are not very cheap we skipped most of the ones with admission costs. It's ok, I'm sure we'll be back to Japan one day. We didn't do nearly enough shopping! It's very difficult to see so many items which we want to buy, but not have the space to carry it all. If we could we would send home boxes and boxes of things. Mostly electronics!! :P
The arcades here are truly something else. We went into a large Namco Tower, which was 7 floors of various arcade games. Something the Japanese love is the "Crane Game" which I'm sure you are all familiar with. You move the crane to position it above the toy you hope to catch, the crane then drops, closes it's claws, and hopefully you've snagged your item!! It's hilarious to watch them just plug the coins in trying to win all the various stuffed animals and trinkets. We've tried twice and didn't even come close. On top of the money change machine they were showing a video with various winning strategies!! Even after watching the video we didn't win anything, although we have seen a lot of winners. We had a wallet scare in the arcade. Devlin left his wallet sitting on a crane game and we walked away. 5 minutes later we realized it was missing and panic ensued. There was a rather shady looking character who was watching us play the crane game and seemed to be tailing us so we were positive he had seen us leave it and picked it up. Dev ran over to one of the attendants and frantically asked "wallet wallet" and she smiled and motioned to her coworker who also smiled and started nodding at us. THANK GOD. She ran into the back room and brought it out. Dev is one lucky duck let me tell you. We said some prayers thanking the man upstairs for our luck and our easy lesson learned. It's a good thing we weren't in China or Vietnam or elsewhere, I think the outcome would have been far worse. Unfortunately we didn't win a single thing from the crane game, even though I desperately wanted a Goomba from the Super Mario game.
Another game they love is the photo booth "game". There was an entire floor teeming with Japanese girls all primped and preened and ready to get their photos taken with their friends. Girls lined up in groups outside the booths, girls giggling from inside the booths, girls in the bathroom doing their hair and curling their eyelashes. It was so cute. They are quite advanced photo booths here, not like the cheap ones in our malls. On yet another level there were fighting games going on and there was even an announcer and people all gathered in groups and cheering when someone would perform a cool move. Video games are a way of life here. In any form they can get.
A cool souvenir we picked up was an awesome house cd (the music that we like). We were in an awesome clothing store that had this wicked music playing so we asked the guy working there what the cd was. He brought out the case and a piece of paper to write down the title and told us it was a Japanese dj and we could buy it at Tower Records. He vaguely pointed in a direction so off we went to find the Tower Records. After searching up and down street after street all afternoon we finally stumbled upon it and found the cd. What an awesome souvenir for us, as most of you know we are music junkies. It's even recorded live in a club here from earlier this year.
Keep safe all of you, we miss you and think of you constantly!! 😊
xoxoxoxoxo
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Andrew & Kimberley
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Its amazing that with all the technology in Japan, the Crane game is still popular!! As for the wallet incident... we understand..!... *wink*!! Have fun!! Miss you guys..... still!