Day 1 - Osaka

By Danae

Yay, touchdown in Japan! And it's summertime, what a welcome respite from Brisbane winter.

Tonight we arrived in Osaka international airport (Kansai) after about a 9 1/2 hour flight. Jetstar is pretty fail, but at two for one tickets you can't really go wrong. They attempt to sting their customers with all manner of extra charges so they can make up for the cheap fares - you even have to pay extra if you want a 'comfort pack' which consists of a pillow, eyemask and blanket (from what I could gather; we were too cheap to purchase one and resorted to using my jacket as a pillow. The buttons were all cold and metallic, not the best pillow). We paid extra to get one entertainment system between us, but they didn't give it to us until well into the flight, and then took it away well before it was necessary to do so (in my opinion - very annoying as I was nearing the end of a movie). The people behind us complained about having to pay extra for beverages. I don't know why they bothered, cause Jetstar certainly don't care! I was even told I had to pay for water, which I did, before discovering their was a fountain on board - just a little hard to fill up the water bottle from but I still gave it a shot.

The main thing was, we got to Osaka all in one piece and navigating the airport was fine. We had to have our fingerprints & photographs taken at the Customs counter because of terrorism measures, quite interesting process. I wasn't looking my best in my photo, unsurprisingly, but they wouldn't listen when I asked for a glamour shot. There was also a swine flu checkup area, but the staff didn't seem to be doing much of a roaring trade. I guess noone wanted to admit if they had any swine flu symptoms. Pretty embarrassing when I started sneezing in the Customs line; I kept waiting for the guys in white coats to come for me - but the staff must have been on their tea break.

The first thing we had to do was to get our Japan Railway pass vouchers exchanged for tickets. Not sure why we coudn't just get the tickets in Australia, but you have to go through this silly process of trying to find the JR desk (which wasn't in the location it was supposed to be, according to my Internet directions) and changing one bit of paper over for another. The main problem was trying to find the counter, which we finally tracked down after some meandering about. The staff spoke next to no English and we speak no Japanese, but it was all good and soon we were leaving with our shiny silver JR passes. Pretty much the 'golden ticket' of railway tickets, they are issued only to foreigners for a set number of days (we got ours for 7 days, but I understand you can also get them for 14, 30 days etc) and allow you to travel on any JR train - except Nozomi or bullet trains - for the period. It is a bit of a bummer that we can't go on bullet trains, but the second fastest train - the Hikari express - is still pretty bloody fast and comes along all the time. You also can't go on the subway system bu t it's pretty cheap to buy day passes. The benefit of the rail pass is that you woud spend more on a trip between say, Osaka and Tokyo - as we plan to do later this week - then you do in the pass. So even if you use it a couple of times it pays for itself really.

We decided not to negotiate the railway/subway system that night as we had arrived at peak hour of 6.30pm, so instead caught an airport limousine (really just a nice bus, despite it's flashy name) for the 50 minute journey to the Sheraton Miyako Hotel, which is in Osaka near the Uchenmachi(?) station. 1500 yen each; this was the quickest and easiest way to get there, otherwise we would have had to catch possibly two JR trains and a couple of subways which sounded difficult with bags and heaps of people about. The hotel is very nice; we got an awesome 4 night deal online so it was surprisingly affordable.

Absolutely buggered, we decided just to go to one of the hotel restaurants for dinner - they have a few different ones including a European, Chinese and Japanese one. It seemed only fitting to go to the Japanese one, and we just scraped in before they closed the doors at 9.30pm. The food was delicious (various sushi and sashimi, miso soup and a weird dessert thing that was nevertheless nice enough - hard to describe, but basically a concoction of jelly type cubes, fruit and red bean paste.) but extremely expensive. We didn't really care at that point given the hour and our tiredness. We accidentally over-ordered on the sake and ended up with two big jugs each. Very tasty. The initial mouthful was a bit full-on, but I quickly adjusted and soon it was going down an absolute treat! The Japanese certainly must love washing up. It was getting ridiculous with the amount of jugs, bowls, plates, cups, etc that we had on the table and at one point I was trying to drink about four different drinks / dishes at once including green tea, sake, hot and cold miso soup (or some sort of soup, not really sure what it was!).