Friday Rambles and Travel Blog 2024-04-12

It's the Friday Rambles for Friday, April 12, of Sunday, April 14. Cut me some slack, I was busy doing international travel.

This past week I was in Japan. I was gonna write a long travel journal here but most of it's like "I went to a place and ate a food" that no one except myself would find interesting, so I'll just post the cliffs notes. [editor's note: I failed and it's still a long travel journal of "I went to a place and ate a food"]

I flew to Osaka because I was meeting a friend on the tail end of their trip, and we were gonna get some fancy expensive omakase sushi together. The restaurant was like, a tiny room with space for a single group of people, with the one sushi master preparing the course. It was my first time eating at a Michelin Star rated restaurant, and it was the first time I felt like, man, this chef is a true artist, and this cuisine is a true art. Highly recommend. It was quite expensive, though, so probably won't do it again unless it's for some really special occasion. Anyway, where's my cultural cuisine honed through centuries of tradition. [editor's note: the hamburger also has a history dating back centuries]

Above: The best sushi I've ever had in my life

I went to Dotombori and saw the Glico Man. I took a picture. It was windy and raining and my umbrella was a tiny travel umbrella so I got kinda wet. Other Osaka things: had fancy coffee, ate fancy skewered meats, ate takoyaki, went to Nintendo Store Osaka

Above: Glico Man

I took the Shinkansen bullet train to Tokyo. Somehow they manage to run every 5 minutes or something, which seems crazy to me. It was an easy and seamless experience. "Whoa!" I thought. "How easy and seamless! Japan sure is advanced!" [editor's note: this is foreshadowing] The trip took 2 and a half hours and I got off at Tokyo Station, checked into my hotel, and took the metro to Shibuya Station because the GiGO Fangamer collab store is there and I wanted to take a picture to post on Twitter in hopes that someone would look at it and think I'm cool or something. On the way there I crossed the Shibuya Scramble Crossing.

Above: Wow! Just like in the video games!

I met up with Nicolith, who helped with LQA for the Japanese localization of Dreams and Deadlines, and we hung out for a bit around Shibuya and Akihabara. I got a Sound Holic Touhou album at Akiba Hobby that I realized later that I have no way to play, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive on anything I own. We went to a fancy burger shop in a less crowded area and I got to feast on this monster of a burger [below]. I also learned that the key to learning a language is to play lots of visual novels. Thank you for this secret knowledge, Nicolith-sama. 

Above: Ate a burger

It's more cheese now than burger. Twisted and evil. Anyway, it was good.

The next day was a full day by myself, and I just wandered around various places in Akiba, Ginza, Ueno, and so on. I saw a bunch of things and ate a bunch of food. It was great. I had the best ramen I've ever had in my life. I walked 25k steps. I went to bed sadly that night knowing I'd have to leave Tokyo the next morning, having seen a tiny fraction of things to see and having eaten a tiny fraction of things to eat.

Above: Ate a burger

Mos Burger was pretty good, for the price and convenience. Felt right to get it on this trip. I was surprised by the portions for the "large" size set, which was very modest in comparison to what I'm used to in the States.

Above: Goodbye Tokyo

The next day I checked out of the hotel and went to Tokyo Station. While trying to take the Shinkansen back to Osaka from Tokyo, due to issues with some arcane combination of basic fare and limited express tickets, I found myself trapped in Tokyo Station for 3 hours, being redirected to various staff and offices throughout the station, each telling me to do something different. I almost lost a bunch of money on tickets that didn't work and my faith in humanity and Japan, but after standing in the JR ticket office line three times, the clerks were able to resolve everything and all I lost was 3 hours, instead of my money and faith in humanity and Japan. Good enough for me. Next time I'll do more research before trying to take the Shinkansen from Tokyo.

Above: Hello again, Osaka

Back in Osaka, I wandered around near the hotel and ate some beef katsu, made with beef from Iowa. It was really good. I went to a random bookstore and saw Rariatoo's comic book. Neat! Maybe I'll be able to read it after I learn how to read Japanese by playing visual novels.

Above: It's always cool to see a physical thing someone you know made, in the wild

The next day I went to the airport. I accidentally left the can of Boss coffee I bought at Family Mart in the hotel room fridge. Ugh! Also, I had an Onigiri "Burger".

Above: Ate a "burger"

It was pretty good and I liked the cute mascots and theming and the novelty of it. Probably the perfect airport food.

I flew back to Korea, which took like 2 hours, and now I'm writing this post in a Starbucks. If I knew I could just, like, go to Japan this easily from Korea, I would have done it way more often when I was working here all those years ago, instead of just sitting around and playing World of Warcraft in my room. So it goes.

Takeaways from my trip:

I posted a lot on my Twitter. It was all pictures of buildings and food, Japan. I'm making a comic about Penny using a professional Twitter account to post pictures of buildings and food to atone for this transgression.

I could survive in Osaka and Tokyo knowing very little Japanese, but it kinda sucks if you need to do anything more complicated than taking the subway somewhere and looking at stuff, or pointing at a thing you want to buy and then buying it, mostly because I feel stupid. I resolved to learn the language before I come back, by playing visual novels.

Walking through Akihabara felt kind of like walking through a permanent and real version of Anime Expo. Except I couldn't read anything, because nothing was localized. A true otaku paradise, in any case. There were lots of salarymen in business suits looking at comic books. Every day they work hard at their company. Then at night they go to Akiba to buy comic books.

Speaking of the real version of things, it was cool to also have real sushi and real ramen and real tonkatsu and real takoyaki and real yakiniku and so on. I now have a baseline reference to base my personal Japanese food ratings on.

Now that I've done my touristy visit to eat expensive sushi and take pictures of Tokyo Tower and Glico Man, I think I'm going to time my future visits with events to attend or exhibit at, particularly indie game events. It turned out that I was gonna miss a monthly indie game event by a week, which was kind of a bummer. But anyway, I first need to learn Japanese by playing visual novels.

Anyway, I think that's it for this week. I'm hoping to actually do some work now that my big trip is done. Thanks for your support, as always. See you next week!