After a relatively late night of 11pm, I still woke up at 6am. This gave me time to walk around the area, but I didn't stay out long. With this being a poor/lower working class area, I didn't really feel that comfortable being out, as I prefer not to get asked for money. I'd like to be able to say "I worked hard and saved my money just to afford this holiday, and you think I should just give you it for free?", but my Japanese isn't good enough for that, so I just say "I don't understand". I went to a local convenience store and grabbed some shaving gel, a notepad and pen and crumbed chicken thingy, before heading back to our hotel.
I had to recheck the meeting time, and it was an earlier 2pm (not the 4pm I thought), as well as get directions on how to get there. Once this was burnt into my memory, I had a shower and a shave and got myself mostly ready. The idea this morning was to go to Umeda, get some breakfast, walk around for a while, before heading to the meeting. It would mean I was in my new meeting shoes pretty much all day, and while I'd have preferred my skate shoes, they weren't too bad.
In Umeda there is the Floating Gardens observatory and a recreated old town scene, but as Dean had forgotten to bring his DSLR, we decided to just potter around the area, rather than go searching for it. We got some breakfast (well, nearly brunch) at an Italian-esque cafe, but with a toasted panini and good coffee, I didn't care if they mixed up their Italian, French and Japanese names. Once we had all stopped the hungry grumbles, we started looking around. It's sort of hard to get your bearings underground, so after looking briefly at a gashapon area (toy capsules), we headed up onto the street. I pointed us roughly in the direction of the Kingdom Hall, hoping we'd find something interesting along the way. We found another mini-mall nestled below the expressway (good use of space) which had Kiddy Land in it. This one was nowhere near as well stocked or laid out as the one in Harajuku, but it gave us something to look at. Before long, it was getting time for lunch (amazing how shopping centres can just suck time like that), so we started looking for somewhere to eat. There was a few places with indistinguishable menus, but we eventually came upon a bagel place. We sat down and ordered some bagels, and I got a BLAT that didn't scrimp on the bacon. It was tasty and filling and would keep us going until well after the meeting.
By the time we'd finished, it was getting on close to 1pm. I had estimated with my head's GPS that we were about 1km as the crow flies from the Hall, so we set off in the direction my head told me. We got there nearly bang on 1.30, and the place was fairly empty. One of the brothers told us that most people don't arrive until 1.55, which is just as well, because the hall, like most Japanese halls is tiny. We met quite a few people. It seems for the English congregations in Japan, there usually a couple of native english speakers, whether from UK, North America, or Australia and NZ, a few from other nationalities (west african, russian, brazilian) that speak better english than Japanese, but the majority being Japanese brothers and sisters helping where there is a need.
It was great to be at a meeting, as you miss it when you aren't there. It's also great to be able to walk into a hall anywhere in the world and immediately have 50-100 friends. A youngish Japanese brother, married to an Indian sister gave the talk. The outline was "Follow the Course of Hospitality", a talk that I've given before, but the beauty of an outline is that each speaker develops the theme individually. I knew the main scriptures that needed to be used, but the information the brother used was different to what I chose.
We stayed after the meeting and chatted to the local brothers and sisters. Some, whose English wasn't as good, thanked us for our comments, while others wanted pictures and chatted about where to go for food and stuff in Osaka.
Following that we walked towards Ogimachi, where one of the brothers said there was a street lined with food (we didn't find it). We stopped off at the Kids Park briefly, then went to Baskin Robbins for an ice cream fix. While there we were trying to decide on the next course of action. We decided to go to Dotonbori, an area famous for its neons and eateries (it's an entertainment area, with lots of karaoke places). We got there, and after spending an eternity in Book Off, we made our way to the main street lined with food stalls, selling takoyaki, yakitori and other street foods. By this stage we were getting to the "too hungry to think" stage, so we went up to one that looked cheap and nice, selling all manner of foods on a stick, and sat down.
Dean started the ordering, with him wanting a 9pc set of various things. Something must have been lost in translation, because we thought that the girl was saying we could order any 9 of the things from the menu. So Dean order 9. Then Paul did the same to share with Zoe. The girl looked at us funny, but kept taking our order, then when Mum ordered another 9 to share with Whitney, she must have thought we were gourmands or gluttons or something. Turns out, the 9 was a preselected set, and we had ordered another 9 on top of that. So when the baskets kept coming we were confused, but did our best to get through them. I also had ordered a bowl of pork kimchi, which tasted fab, but didn't have enough chilli. After finishing everything off, we sat around waiting for our food to digest a little, before we decided to get out of there, as a both of the booths near us were lighting up like chimneys. We walked around some more, but it was getting on to 7 o'clock, and everyone was getting tired, so we headed back towards Nanba station. There is a problem being a guy in Japan and it is this: nearly everywhere you walk, there are womens clothes shops, but no seats. There was another understreet/ground mall, akin to Yaesu, but with no wonderful, fantastic bottleshop at the end. It got to the stage where we just wanted to head back to base, but with Zoe and Whitney doing the bumble-bee and going into every shop, it got to the stage where Paul and I just kept walking slowly, and they had to keep up. My feet were hurting from breaking in a new pair of meeting shoes, with no arch support.
We eventually made it back to the station, and after a 2 stop strategy, we made our way back, via the Family Mart to grab the all important ingredients of chu-hi and ice cream. Everyone was tired and didn't feel like handing out, so I put some clothes in for washing, while Dean and I watched a football match or two. By the time the clothes had finished being in the dryer, it was 11.20, so I went out like a light.
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