During the second week of my stay in Japan, I travelled to Osaka with my Japan Rail Pass. The pass gives you the opportunity to travel with the JR lines across Japan as much as you like. I had bought one for all of Japan, for one week. My friend didn’t want to leave Tokyo, while I felt like it would be a pity to only stay in one town in Japan. So, after freaking out for a while thinking that I would have to stay in Tokyo, I simply decided to go by myself. The picture on the right shows where I travelled in this week.
Although travelling by myself wasn’t always fun, afterwards I was definitely glad I didn’t only stay in Tokyo, because Tokyo is a very bad representation of Japan. I’m quite fond of nature, and during this week I found myself on mountaintops, surrounded by forests and beautiful valleys, something I would have never seen when I had stayed in the grey Tokyo.
I travelled to Osaka with the shinkansen (super fast bullet train), which took me about three hours for 550 km. I took the subway to the area near my hotel. While I was still standing outside the subway station and just orientating myself, a guy biked past and literally jumped off his bike to help me to find the hotel. So, with his help I found it, but unfortunately the hotel staff was very unfriendly which was a big change compared to Tokyo.
The hotel was New Chuo, and it was quite cheap as well and my room was much bigger than in Tokyo and my futon was like, three times as thick, so sleeping there was very comfortable. Also, internet was free and there were three computers. All rooms also had a TV with video recorder and downstairs in the lobby there were videos. And of course a heap of porn videos that could be rented… For some reason the people liked to sit around there in their pajama’s as well.
In the afternoon, I went to explore the city, which was unfortunately a bit disappointing to me. I went to the Namba district but that turned out to be full with pachinkos and arcades only.
