April 12, wandering the countryside

Back in time again! We took the train out to the countryside and walked around a little village for the afternoon.

This place is fun. Sean dropped his sunglasses down the embankment, so I went down to get them. I put my stuff down on the path, climbed down and climbed up again. …then forgot my phone on the path. Realized this 15 minutes later and had to run back to get it. Problem solved, have phone, but damnit I hate when that happens.

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At the train station before we got here, Sean bought cake and shared it.

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This is a fairly common example of a house in the area. Not a lot of people, but man were their houses gorgeous! (to be fair, I took photos of the most beautiful houses, although most had a similar style, not all were this lovely)

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Mini temple in the middle of some farm land.

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I loved this house because most of it looks like this Japanese stereotype, but the balcony is filled with items that could be on a balcony in Vancouver. 🙂

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We had decided to go to another train station (free train is awesome!!) and visit the oldest shrine in Japan, but got distracted by this shrine. We saw a gateway, which led up the hill and to the highway here.

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At the top of those stairs, shrine! We took photos and cleansed ourselves again, and gave money to appease the spirits and hope all went well.

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Hungry, we found a corner store and bought the most delicious apples.

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We got on the train again and got off in the town with the oldest shrine. We were hungry, so we found a restaurant that looked good and sat down. Little did we know at the time that we’d be spending many hours there. I posted about those giant bottles of beer before, then were 650 yen, which is an excellent price. We bought 7 of them before we left, and a ton of fish. The most delicious fish I’ve had on the trip so far. We didn’t make it to the shrine!

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That night we trained home, dropped off our stuff and headed out to go drinking. We wandered to a place called Space Station that sounded like it might be up our alley, but it was full and the other two didn’t so much like it. (It was playing my kind of music…)

We had pizzas and another drink at a Spanish themed bar/restaurant then continued on.

Almost our last hope before calling it quits and giving up was the Rock Rock Music bar. We went up 3 floors to a little bar, with only 2 other people in it. And it wasn’t a small place. We ordered a drink, because we were there. Before that drink ended, another 8 people showed up as a group and they really livened the place up. They were playing darts and dancing, and the DJ put on some 90s pop punk and we ended up staying there and drinking a lot before 2am when the place closed!

Back home, Sean and I had a game of Star Realms since we didn’t want to lie down for fear of the spins. I had an excellent drunken text conversation with Miranda, since 3am local is 11am PST and I think it was a weekend. She had drunkenly text me the “night” (Vancouver time) before, but I think I may have been a little more over the top. I don’t drink to excess often, but this was a wicked fun night. 🙂

We had to wake up the next morning for 9am so we could pack and be out the door by 10am, as this was our last night in Osaka and we had to check out of our residence. Rough morning! We had nothing but training to Arima Onsen planned for the next day…which is another post!

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