Sunday, October 26, 2008

Pub crawl back to the Mansion

After the zoo, we were getting kind of hungry, and luckily, directly across the street from the Zoo was a street bazaar. It had many shops and a ton of places to eat and again, lucky us, it was the beginning of happy hour! When we started down this street, I noticed a big golden statue of a fat man sitting in a thrown. On the bottom of the statue it has the words, "The God of Things as They Ought to Be." I became minorly obsessed with this guy and started taking as many pictures as I could. These statues were all over the street. There was even one of those face cut-out picture things where I was this fat statue guy and Lauren was a Sumo wrestler.

We ducked into a little place that had a sign that read 190 yen for Kirin draught. We got some skewered meat and veggies and each had a beer. They gave us free cabbage and we met a guy from Chicago who was studying in Osaka for the year. Lauren also went to school near Chicago, so she was really excited to meet this guy. He was really nice and we talked about the food and Osaka for a few minutes. His Japanese was really good and it made me want to practice mine a little more too.

After we were finished our small appetizer and beers, we headed out with no plan just to explore some more of this crazy bazaar! I happened to glance down a side street and read a sign that said Karaoke. Of course Lauren and I had to go. We booked a room for an hour and ordered another set of drinks. She had a Moscow Mule and I had a G&T. We sang our little hearts out for our hour and then started back on that dusty trail to find more excitement and entertainment! We vaguely remembered how to get back to the station - and by vaguely I mean that we had gotten ourselves so turned around we just weren't sure any more. So we just started walking around the outside of the zoo, back in the bustling city of Osaka. We happened upon a nice woman and asked her directions back to the station, she pointed us in the right direction and we were on our way back to the Mansion, so we thought. As we are plodding along the sidewalk, I see a sign for a German Pub with an arrow pointed down an alley. Sketchy? Maybe if we weren't in Japan it would have been, but we headed down the alley and happened upon a quaint little pub with a fantastic bar mistress. Lauren knows German better than I know Japanese so she was really excited to be in this little place.

We found out that the woman who owned the pub was married to a German man and had lived there for a little while. So we ordered a round of cold German beer and chit-chatted in English/German/Japanese for a while. It was such a good time and this woman was so excited to talk to us. We talked about traveling, and teaching, and boys (ooh la la) and food and language. I am so happy to have met her! Next, we really did find the station this time and we made our way back to the vicinity of the Mansion. Before we got there though, we popped into a little bar called Tani York.

This place was right across the street from the Mansion and I was initially drawn to it because it had a large blow-up bottle of Southern Comfort in the window. Frankly I was not expecting to see SoCo anywhere in Japan, so I was intrigued. We walked up the little stairs and turned out we were the only people in this little place. Oddly that happened a lot during our stay in Osaka... Anyway, the girl working was named Aki and she was adorable. Her English was very good and she spoke Spanish very well too. She spent some time in Mexico because her uncle moved there to open a Chinese restaurant. I thought that was a little funny. But now she is just living and working in Osaka and loves to speak English and Spanish any time. Lauren and I both ordered a White Russian. It tasted like candy - I hadn't had Kahlua since I had been in Japan and really I wanted a Black Russian, but White was all Aki knew how to make.

A little later Aki's friend came in, his nickname was Soldier, and he bought Lauren and I our next drinks. Lauren had a Leiche cocktail and I had a grapefruit cocktail. We sat and chatted a lot. It was fun to make some more new friends during our short time in Osaka. Around 1am or so Lauren and I started to lose steam in a major way, so we bid our new friends adieu and headed back across the street to the Mansion. Our first day in Osaka was completely filled to the brim and that is kind of the pace we kept up for the rest of the weekend!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I bet the singing was good. I guess you can meet people in a number of different places. It does sound like you are enjoying your adventure.

Anonymous said...

What a fun adventure!

Mikey said...

Pretty sweet bar crawl! I think it's funny how you want us to feel like it's high-brow by calling it a "pub" crawl. I think I should go on another bar crawl soon; last time I went, we all got free t-shirts to wear on the adventure, and I do enjoy free t-shirts!