osaka

on vernal equinox day (one of the many national holidays in japan), amanda and i decided to take a trip down to the 3rd biggest city in japan, osaka. as an fyi, the 4 biggest cities in japan are as follows...tokyo, yokohama, osaka, and nagoya. it was a tuesday and ecc was closed for the holiday, so it seemed like a good idea for a day trip.

we took the shinkansen which conveniently was only about 30 mins from nagoya, arrived in osaka, and immediately went to work. we visited shinsaibashi, home of a famous shopping arcade and where japanese line up by the bucketfull to eat fresh takoyaki, essentially battered octopus balls which i love and my dad heroically tried during his visit here. we visited namba, home of the trendy shopping mall zep five and where osakas high school students flock to after schools done. we visited americamura, translated the american village, to eat some more takoyaki and to see what fashion disasters had appeared in the past ten years. at night we went back to shinsaibashi to check out how much neon there really is in a japanese big city.

one of my personal highlights was a visit to dotomburi, the home of den den town, translated electric town, which is where you go if you wanna buy cheap electronics. right out of the subway exit i found a vintage video game shop called super potato which had more classic video game systems and games than id ever seen in my life. if it existed in a video game format, you could find it in that store. aside from the massive collection of nintendo, super nintendo, genesis, and game boy games, they had rare stuff for systems like the sega 32x, atari 2600, 3d0, atari jaguar, neo geo, and even the virtual boy. i did something i had wanted to do for a long time...buy an old japanese super nintendo and about 12 classic games with it, including everything from super mario world to super metroid to contra to nhl 94. all for under 10000 yen, or under 100 dollars. i feel like i stole from the place legally.