Day 63 (Osaka) : After the drinky boo

I got home a little after midnight tonight after a brisk eight minute walk from my classmates 1R apartment. I followed through on the mixed offer to go to the aquarium, which ended up being an obligation when Andy said he would buy tickets for everyone after class. It's easy enough to suddenly be busy when nothing is invested, but after the money is spent you're kind of tied in. The aquarium came in a package that included a subway pass we ended up using for the rest of the day to bounce back and forth between stations looking for a place to drink.

The aquarium itself was pretty blah, blah, blah. After you have seen one aquarium in Japan, you have seen them all. They start at one habitat in the world and each window you walk past is full of some fish or animals from a different place. The things you can count on seeing are dolphins, penguins, jellyfish, and whale sharks. They seem to be at every aquarium. At first I thought we would eat at one of the expensive restaurants in the aquariums connecting mall, but we ended up catching the subway to Shinsaibashi and going to the sushi tabehoudai that I missed the last time. (tabehoudai = all you can eat) The price for unlimited all you can eat sushi at this place was 980 yen (a little less than $10). The difference between this restaurant and more expensive places is the selection. I ended up eating 18 plates but they were amlost all salmon with maybe three tuna and a single crab salad.

Not to complain though, cheap sushi is awesome! It's hard to beat with a stick because the rice goes everywhere... At any rate, we had to walk around for an hour or so shopping before everyone could recover from over-eating and buy into my idea of going out drinking. That plan fizzled when we had a hard time finding a place to drink. The first place we went was a stick joint near our school but it was packed and the waitress told us that we might get in if we came back at 9pm. For reference, it was just after 6pm when we first showed up at that place.

After that I tried to re-enact the night I went out drinking with Hirokazu so I could find the two or three streets that were packed with plays serving beer for under 200 yen (about $2) which for Japan is pretty amazing. With that failure we decided to go to a super market to get cheap beer and go back to one of my classmates apartments that was nearby. I might talk more about that tomorrow becuase I'm kind of worn out tonight and I've written a lot already.