October 5, 2006 Osaka

Since Lisa posted yesterday, it’s my turn today.

I can kind of sum up our stay in Osaka in one word… Airport. The airport provided us with entertainment, a place to sleep, and a place to eat. I’ve got to say, the airport was actually a pretty nice stay! But it definitely wasn’t what we were initially planning on doing. When we got to the airport, our intention was to explore the city for the day. We got in at about 2PM that afternoon. And our flight to Shanghai wasn’t until 11:15am the following day. So we really had a lot of time to kill. However, it turned out that the city was quite far from Kansai International, so Lisa and I decided to rough it in the airport.

They have pretty cool vending machines in Japan, it’s too bad we can’t read anything…. Oh and another cool thing they have are bathrooms… especially their hand dryers, they dry your hands in literally seconds. Definitely a model of efficiency.

So we had about 20 hours to kill… what to do? Well, I pulled out the laptop, and low and behold, free internet. So I surfed the net for awhile, connected to my slingbox back home and watched some TV. The airport is actually quite hot…. One thing I noticed, AC in Asia isn’t very cool at all. So Lisa and I both changed into our shorts and T’s. Ahhhh, way better. About 19 hours left to kill… what to do? Well, we decided to catch up on some television shows that we missed in Vancouver. Watched Heroes, turned out to be pretty good. Caught up on Smallville, and I watched Southpark… (lisa’s fell asleep).

It was nearing dinner time, and we were getting pretty hungry, so we walked around the terminal for quite sometime, and ended up deciding on a Japanese Noodle House. I had some cold noodles which Don recommended to me… wasn’t as good as I thought it would be…. But that’s okay, cause Lisa ordered a good dish. Surprisingly, food in Japan was a lot cheaper than I thought it would be. That will hopefully be a continuing theme throughout this trip =)

Lisa and I had to get a good night’s rest, so we found a place on the 4th floor of the International terminal and fell asleep. At about 3am in the morning, we were awoken by 2 Japanese female security guards… well, I should say that Lisa was awoken, cause I had no idea. They were nice enough to continue to let us sleep the night.