People Visiting

 I am running a few months late with my posts, but I hope to catch you up on some of the important events in this post. I’ve been staying up to date with basically everything except for the big excursions/people visiting. So let me give you a timeline here…Since November, I have had a few people visit, and I've gone to Okinawa, up north past Tokyo to Ibaraki and Tochigi-ken, and home to America! In this post, I’m only going to tell you about when people came to Osaka to visit me. Since I have been busy, they will probably shorter and less detailed than I want them to be, and it’s been so long that I probably can’t recall the details very well.

So first, back in November, my friend from college who is also a JET but is placed in Hokkaido flew down to visit me. She was the first person to visit after my friend from Ohio. It was a short visit. She came on a Friday night. We got some take-out and chilled out while we watched and laughed at the first Twilight movie. The second day was crazy! It started off nice and peaceful with some lunch at an Italian restaurant in Kyobashi followed by shopping downtown and dinner at El Pancho. We wanted to meet some of my JET friends at a bar with no real intentions of staying out until first train. They were all about going to one of those WhyNot? nomihoudai (all you can drink) paries at Pure so we decided to join. It was jam packed! I must say, while avoiding the Armenian creeps and other weirdos, I met a lot of cool people there! We had to make a decision if we wanted to head home or stay out all night. Since it was a special party, they handed out ticket to everyone for a free drink if you go to the after party at a different location. It seemed like everyone else was pulling an all-nighter, and the new Japanese friends we just met asked us to come to the after party with them, so we did. Oh, the commitment of an all-nighter…why Japan? WHY?! Anyway, I don’t even know/remember where the after party was at. I just remember that after getting our free drinks there, someone decided that we should go to Cinquentcento. So the group of five of us (my friend and I and the three Japanese people we met (2 boys and 1 girl)) went to Cinquencento. By the way, a random thing I was surprised by was the fact that the Japanese girl we were with was underage and drinking in all these bars! I didn’t know people in Japan even tried to get away with stuff like that. I thought they were too respectful of the laws lol! I guess were not so different after all. No one was even carding her. She looked old enough to me but she was only 16!! That’s younger than my little sister! After thinking about it, I felt really strange about partying with someone younger than my sister. She just seemed so mature, though. At Cinquencento, we met a person from New Zealand. He was very nice. All the three Japanese people left Cinquencento to catch their last trains (theirs were later than ours) because the two boys were in med school and had stuff to do the next day. So, the nice New Zealand guy we met suggested we go to Sam & Daves. It’s a dance club I had never been too. I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back because it was so packed with straight up creepers. The second Anna and I stepped in, these Indonesian guys that didn’t know English started trying to dance with us and hit on us…they kept trying to speak to us in Japanese, but we couldn’t really hear anything. Anyway, it was really crazy there, and by the time the first train came, I was so ready to go home. We slept like all day the next day. Maybe that was the night we watched Twilight and got take out. I can’t remember. Either way, Friday and Sunday night were both relaxing. I think we actually went to McDonalds the first night now that I think about it. She left Monday morning with a very crazy impression of Osaka :P

Yummy Italian restaurant. Basically her visiting consisted
of us eating a bunch of food because she lives in the middle of
nowhere in Hokkaido and doesn't have any good places to eat.

Dinner at El Pancho.

Dessert at Partyland.

Dancing at Pure!

My next big visitor was my really good friend from high school, Mitch! He flew all the way from America! He came like a week after I came back to Japan after my Christmas break in America so it hadn’t been that long since I saw him (only one week really lol). He stayed a whole week! Although I hadn’t had much time back in Japan to start missing everyone again, for some reason, I had a really hard time saying goodbye when he left…I had to instantly do some therapeutic shopping lol! Because he was here for so long, I don’t really want to write a novel about every little thing we did so I will give you and overview. First though, I just want to say how interesting it is to me to see how people react to Japan who don’t know much about it. Things that I don’t notice or have gotten used sometimes surprise people who have never been here. For example, when he go to my apartment, we ate some food. I gave him some chopsticks to use. He looked at the chopsticks and said something like, “Wow! These chopsticks are so legit!” I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he said, “I’m only used to using the crappy cheap wooden ones that you break in half.” I have never once thought twice about my chopstick or considered them fancy haha.

So anyway, the first day he was here, we went to Nara. I loved how he appreciated Japan so much. He thought it was really beautiful. We ate our first meal out at a matcha café. It was so nice and delicious. He came up with an adjective for the place which he then used throughout the rest of the trip, “zen-y.” He also decided that when he was here, he wanted to eat as much Japanese food as possible which was kind of fun! I did a really good job of well rounding his Japanese food experience. We had takoyaki, okonomiyaki, yakisoba, kaiten-sushi, kushi-katsu, katsudon, udon, yakiniku, and more! It was strange for me because my last visitor from America, wasn’t too keen on trying much Japanese food. The night after going to Nara, we went to Tennoji for kushi katsu which ended up being his favorite meal I think. The next day, we went to downtown Osaka and shopped, did purikura, went to kaiten sushi and a bar, and he bought me one of my favorite gifts ever…a hookah! We returned home and went to my favorite little bar in my town. This is the bar I mentioned in one of my very first posts; the one that I really liked, but was not confident enough to go alone…well, that’s changed!! Yay me! The next day we went to Kyoto. It’s so hard to do Kyoto in a day, but we managed to explore all of Arashiyama and still make it to the other side of Kyoto to see Kiyomizu-dera. We did something in Arashiyama that I’ve never done before…the monkey park! It was so cool! We got to see monkeys in the wild and feed them nuts and apples! The next day, I had to go back to work so I gave Mitch ideas of what to do while I was working. When I returned home, we would usually go out somewhere for dinner and just kind of chill. I can’t remember everything he did, but I know he went to Osaka castle and Spa World. I was so proud of him for going to Spa World all on his own! Most foreigners would freak out about it, but he seemed to end up really enjoying it! I think he ended up leaving on a Saturday afternoon. I do recall two more things of interest. One, we went out for dinner at a yakiniku place right in my town, and it ended up being one of my favorite dinners I've eaten in Japan! The place was super nice on the inside, and the waitresses were so kind and friendly. We did tabehoudai (all you can eat). My friend loved grilling the meats and veggies. The only bad part was that I had my foot bent at a weird angle the whole time we were there for some reason, and when I stood up after like two hours, I literally could barely walk! It was so hard to walk home! It was a bit better when I woke up, but it still hurt for a few days :S On his last night here, we went to Umeda (north Osaka) and got dinner at an okonomiyaki place, and we went to Round One and played games which was fun. We ended the night by going back to the bar in my town. It was really good having him here!

Maccha cafe!

Mitch with a deer in Nara.

He liked kushi-katsu.

Arcade.

Feeding monkeys in Arashiyama.

Yakiniku.

Lastly, I want to end by saying that in about one week, something major is going to happen…my boyfriend is coming to Japan to live with me for over two months!!! My lifestyle is going to change drastically during the time he’s here, and I probably won’t know how to resume my life as normal once he leaves…I don’t want to even think about that. I think it will be really fun to show him Japan like I have with my other friends, and it will also be really nice to have someone here to help me out with the housework lol. I think it will really strengthen our relationship, and give us a taste of what it will be like to live together if we ever get married. We've already made some travel plans like an overnight ryokan stay in Kyoto and a five day trip in Tokyo. We are going to go to the Ghibli Museum which I’m so excited about! I've been there once, but I loved it, and I will get so much joy out of seeing his reaction to it seeing as my boyfriend is an artist. I’m going to be living in Japan differently for the next two months. I’m excited to see things from a different perspective. I hope he likes it here!