Going wild in the aisles...

Well from the off it seemed like it was going to be an exciting trip and it lived up to its promise. Rushing to do a couple of errands before getting on the bus for a couple of hours rest before the crazy sightseeing weekend began I felt much cheerier than I had all week, and upon seeing Jessica for the first time in 5 years and meeting Madeleine for the first time outside Osaka's Hep 5 shopping mall I perked up even more. I've never met two people who like to photograph things as much as I do, and we frequently stopped to take a quick snap of something or other as we looked for a place to eat .

Thursday night began with dinner in a small restaurant in the dining area behind the Hankyu Umeda station where the waitress impressed us all with a) her English and b) the food and I impressed no-one with my lack of local knowledge. Although I did know where the shops were...

Friday was when the delirium started to kick in for all of us, so much so that while sat on the train taking stupid pictures of ourselves and marvelling at the fact that we had all selected neon colours to wear without planning, we missed our stop. And it wasn't even me that noticed it. Tour guide loses 1 point. So we changed and got back on track wondering how we'd know which train would take us to Universal Studios. Oh, it'll be that one. The one with Universal Studios written all over it in massive lettering. Universal Studios was chosen as our first trip because it was Madeleine's birthday and we felt the need to do something silly and fun to mark it. So we screamed on the Spiderman ride, ducked and weaved in our seats on the Back To The Future ride, got bored in Backdraft, laughed at our boat's captain at Jaws as she slid down the steering wheel in mock terror, got soaked on Jurassic Park and laughed at the shop dummies in the ET ride. And between every ride we looked around the shops, Madeleine and Jessica crazily planning what souvenirs to buy. Me? I bought a Hello Kitty mug and a wind up Jaws that "eats" it's victim. Lunch was spent in an authentic 50's diner (with authentically bad food and authentically high theme park prices) and after we finished ET with 45 minutes to go till the park shut we went shopping crazy. Except the park didn't shut after half an hour. The shops closed their doors to new customers an hour and a quarter later and eventually the whole thing shut at eight. So we planned to make our way back, but instead managed to trawl the shops outside the park before heading back to the hotel via a lovely izakaya where Jessica ate the first of many diakon salads.

As rainy weather had been forecast, Saturday was planned as a day of culture so we headed off to the Miho museum in Kyoto via a small town (Ishiyama) where we took photos of cartoon telephone operators exposing their knickers on a shop front. The museum itself was beautiful, the grounds and buildings designed by I.M. Pei, a Chinese gentleman who is apparently a very famous architect. He also designed the pyramids at the Louvre. The consensus was that the building was far more stunning than the artefacts within, although the cafe was superb. The whole thing is tied in with a not very well known religion called Shinji Shumeikai and the museum was commissioned on behalf of the religion. From the giant windows inside you can see the main centre of worship for the religion and a bell tower also designed by I. M. Pei. We decided, as you would, that this was a cult and a very rich one, although as they make such lovely bread they couldn't be sinister in any way.

On returning to Osaka we headed back to the hotel for a rest as the previous night had been a late one and we were starting to tire. So after a shower and a lie down we got back up and headed down to Shinsaibashi and met Saddam in a fast food place which we quickly left to find somewhere more suitable for dinner. And we ended up in a Korean cafe which was lovely, and was also cheap. Keiran came and joined us (he and Sarah and others were in town to go clubbing) and soon we were traipsing the streets to meet others and find a bar to drink at. But when we found a bar, Jessica, Madeleine and I decided that actually we'd rather have a look round on our own and head back to the hotel. So we started wandering around the backstreets of Shinsaibashi, coming across various love hotels, strange bits of architecture and eventually a sake bar we liked the look of. So we went in and, much to the owner's amusement, ordered sake. The sake was very good and made us laugh more and more, and by the time we left we were all feeling a bit tipsy. So we stumbled through America mura (America village) into a Lawson's to buy choclit and then walked back to the hotel which was longer than I remembered, but we were three sheets to the wind anyway so it didn't matter...

Sunday was traditional Kyoto day. Doing the usual tour we headed to Kiyomizu dera (always beautiful no matter how many times you've seen it) where we took our time taking photos and then headed off round the back streets to take in many of the products at the souvenir shops. This led us to the Yasaka pagoda where we saw two Geisha who weren't happy to have their photograph taken (I had asked them politely) and then wandered off to the Yasaka shrine for more photos and ended up watching a man juggling what looked like skittles on fire (as in bowling pins, not "taste the rainbow of fruit flavours" Skittles- that would surely have led to burns and a trip to the hospital). After a quick bite to eat we headed onwards stopping at Chionin temple (but only going up the steps) before we decided we would go to Nijo castle (well, I really wanted to go and Madeleine and Jessica were kind enough to humour me) so we got on a bus at maybe 3:40 and after passing maybe 5 blocks at a pace of 3 miles an hour we got off the bus only to find last entry to the castle was at 4 and it was now 4:30. D'oh! But the length of the bus journey caused Madeleine and I to become a bit impaired and we started laughing at random things, dropping things, squinting at things outside, and at one point turned around to ask the woman behind us what the design was on a kimono standing outside a shop. It was a cat. And then this woman started laughing and we realised she'd been laughing for maybe 20 minutes before at our high levels of impairment.

Returning to Osaka via Lawson's, the Post Office, and an anime display in Kyoto station, we headed to the shops for a carefully co-ordinated 2 hour shopping trip before going for food in another healthy restaurant. All this fresh wholesome food is dangerous. It's making my clothes go pop. By the time we made it to the restaurant we were all extremely tired, particularly Jessica who still hadn't had a good night's sleep, so we ate and left when they closed, and despite our best efforts we got back to the hotel at around 11:45, and with emails and sorting stuff out it was 12:30 before we were in bed.

On Monday I left the girls to their plans (museum and shopping) and prepared to head back to Katsuyama. I made the obligatory trip to Starbucks and was very pleased that I did so as the very handsome member of staff was also very friendly, so we swapped numbers and will hang out sometime (although this being Japan he probably wants to talk about baseball or something equally useless...) Also, I furthered my looking-young-by-dressing-young scheme and bought yellow and blue trainers, although I am worried that this will soon mutate into a looking-retarded-by-dressing-retarded scheme (why do people with special needs always have carers with no fashion sense?) I shall have to be careful.

And after a much better day at Junior High yesterday I went home to finish tidying up and at 8:30 picked up Jessica and Madeleine from the station, whisked them back to my luxury apartment in Janice mark 2 and then we went to local restaurant Wakaba which Madeleine declared had "the best food she'd tasted in Japan". I agree. Everyone should come to Wakaba at least once. And visit me while you're at it...