After a 20 hour travel day, we finally arrived at our friend’s apartment here in Osaka. We are situated near Shin-Osaka which means literally “New Osaka”. It is the heart of the business district and, interestingly, our friend’s apartment was created from an old office buildling.

I personally find the apartment to be cozy but I’ve been told that this is quite large. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, imagine a large bathtub. This is how large the entire washroom is, including the sink, toilet, and shower.

The flight itself was rather uneventful except for some extreme turbulence in the last half hour. The Kansai Airport where we arrived was, as one might imagine, very large and quite modern.

Clearing immigration was pretty smooth, except for an officer who kept looking at my 4 year old passport picture (where I was an additional 20 pounds heavier) and back at me and back at the picture, and then through customs, which was very quick.

Because the Kansai Airport is actually quite a distance from Shin-Osaka, we needed to take a train into town. We took an express train which was quite expensive. For the two of us it was almost 60 dollars to get there, although a taxi ride would have no doubt taken us much longer as the train ride was a good half an hour at blistering speeds.

We arrived at the Shin-Osaka station to torrential rains. Did I mention that I had packed my jacket at the bottom of my suitcase and therefore was unwilling to open it up in the middle of rush hour foot traffic? Not only that, the exit my friend had told us to use was almost a kilometre walk underground with large staircases in our way, and about 150 pounds of luggage.

Many friendly locals, sensing no doubt that we were lost tourists, attempted to help us but we eventually found an exit that was serviceable. Unfortunately it meant that we had to walk through the rain quite a distance. After about 45 minutes of searching (in what would have taken 5 minutes had we known where we were going) we found our friend’s apartment.

Coincidentally, he was coming out of the elevator as we were going in. He had been unable to meet us at the airport because he was performing at a local club but had come home during a short break to see if were there. He was on his way out of the building and in a hurry, so we went up to his apartment on the 10th floor.

Extremely tired, we both took turns showering in the tiny washroom and hit the hay. Our friend generously provided us his bedroom for the trip which we declined but later accepted for at least the first week while we acclimatize to the jetlag. Washed up and to bed by 6PM…what are we, 80?!

I woke up at 5am today. 11 hours in bed, not too bad. Today, we need to pick up some supplies like flip flops for inside the house, a small wallet for Japanese currency, and various knick knacks. We’ll probably try and go to Daiso today; yes they have that here too!