Osaka

Osaka is the capital of eccentricity in Japan. It is known that there's a running joke in the entire city that if you walk up to someone and pretend to shoot them with finger guns they'll fall over and play along...young, old, pets, whatever. It's true too! Dunno what that has to do with anything but I guess it gives you an idea of what a quirky city this is.

Very interesting place, Osaka is...

We asked a random chick to take a picture for us in front of this drummer boy but then her entire posse rushed around to hand us all their poster advertisements!? LOL

Octopus balls...MMMM!

Yakitori is the funnest and cheapest food you can get in Japan

So yummy, I can eat like a million of these

This is the view from the lecture room in their university....what the hell. FML.

I have many things on my Japan to-do list, but the top is to eat a wonderful matsusaka steak dinner. I had some matsusaka at the ryokan but it was just brisket....I wanted to real shabam! Let me just say it definitely lives up to its title as the finest, most exquisitely marbled and textured beef in the world. It's so good I bet it could turn vegetarians into carnivores!

Grill hot and ready to go

The lighting in this restaurant was so bright and orange and shitty. You can barely see what it really looks like in this picture, but the marbling was so pronounced! I had to resist eating it raw right then and there.

Oh yes. Ohhhhhh yessssss. It doesn't even taste like meat...just buttery protein that you don't even have to chew.

Guess where I went to lunch the next day? The convenience store of course! Actually, 80% of all my lunches thus far in Japan has been at the convenience store...the food is really good there! These half-wiches could easily be in any sandwich restaurants in America. I take that back actually, because sandwiches in America are disgusting and I'd never waste my money on such things HMPH.

Grilled oysters...guess where I bought these? The convenience store too!!! I swear. They were fresh too, just sitting on the heating rack at the cash register. Why, God, why am I not Japanese.

Yummy sweet potato gelato! .........JUST KIDDING it's just a plastic display! :D Japan loves their realistic looking plastic displays. The real thing was, of course, very good too.

More money-sucking realistic looking food displays. I think this is a very effective marketing strategy that America can learn from. Imagine trying to walk your wallet away from this. It's impossible.

Berry berry gelato crepe. So yummy *SIGH* as always...

Another thing I really wanted to see in Japan was one of their crazy festivals. The Sanja Matsuri festival took place the other day in Tokyo and the parade was nuts. There was like a million people (literally, every year around 2 million people come to see this huge festival). I couldn't breathe or move but it was fucking awesome. I took hundreds of photos so I'll save you the headache and post the costumes that looked the cutest!

So imagine these men, but completely naked and covered in tattoos from head to toe. I don't know if I can post such x-rated things though so you'll just have to use your imagination.

Geisha parade = the best kinda parade

I'm gonna go ahead and guess they're birds.

OK, can we just take a moment to talk about how Japan is the most civilized and sophisticated society in the world?

There's so many aspects of the country that I can go on and on about, but shinkansen are one of those things that have just blown my brains. These bullet trains that are the fastest in the world are perfectly demonstrative of how elite and technologically advanced Japan is, and how shitty it makes the rest of us look with our stone age gadgets.

The shinkansen that I blog from goes at almost 300 mi/hr, has plugs for all my electronics in every seat, max reclining wide super comfy chairs, surgically clean bathrooms, smoking lounge, cars exclusively for women, wide screen TVs that play sumo matches, and zero turbulence at that! Japan is like, no it's not enough that we have a train that's fast as all shit, but we gotta make it wifi capable and build the rail so that it goes through the most amazing Japanese countryside landscapes so that our passengers can watch youtube videos for hours and have a really nice view too! Technology at its freaking best. And they're always on time too, right down to the second!

I once stupidly left my backpack on the train, and they had it delivered to my next destination. If this were any other country, I am 99.99% sure that everything would be stolen and sold on ebay before I even realized what happened. I don't wanna take another shitty plane in my life, with its bitchy air hostesses and horrifically uncomfortable seats. In Japan, you can get to any city in a matter of hours by train. In one leg of my trip, I couldn't find any affordable hotels, so I just took the shinkansen to another city that is about the distance of New York City to Charlotte, North Carolina in a matter of hours just to get a cheaper hotel for the night! Imagine doing that in the US. Like if NYC hotels are too expensive then you tried to go to the deep south just for the night and back in the morning. I’d rather drown.

I have so many more pictures to sort throughdhasjfhasfhlgal!!!!!!