osaka

Man, this city is plenty cool.

Kinda New York, kinda china, kinda blade runner.
Lots of cool grey buildings.
Crazy clean.
Lots of well-dressed people.
Lots of beautiful women wearing high boots and short skirts.
My hotel room in 2m x 1m x 1m, and it's super rad.
And the mini tv has a pixelated porn station on it.
The toilet seats are warm, and they can spray hot water at your anus with pinpoint precision.
And then blow it dry after.
The vending machines will give you a HOT can of coffee.
It's not way off in the future, but def a few years ahead, i'd say.
The whole place also seems pretty darn civilized.
In comparison to china, for sure.


On my 1st night here, i went to a super lame place called Girl Bar cause i thought it might have sexy dancers or something, and i was ushered in by the girls out on the street. but i just paid way too much for a cup of tea, and had a non-conversation with the server. Such are my japanese skills.

Watashiwa beijitarian desu - i'm veg. That's about all i know.

Anyhow, in desperation i looked for another bar, and found some small one where a drunken birhtday boy was pouring champagne, and immediately poured me a glass. So in the end me and these two guys ( a couple it turned out) ended up getting quite drunk, which was all quite entertaining. one guy spoke a wee bit of Eng, and the other a wee bit of mandarin, so we got by, just barely.

We sang a bit of karaoke, drank sake beer, champagne, and some girly mango stuff, which was pretty awesome.

Then got to my capsule hotel, lay down, and realized it was 5 am.

Peking Acrobats

i finally went out and saw the acrobats. Wow, that was $25 well spent on total entertainment. If people practice, they can do some pretty insane shit.

Pbly the craziest things was this dude on a slack wire (a tight rope that's not tight) balanced, swinging back and forth, balanced upright, ON HIS HEAD. WTF? Are you kidding me?

Also, i dug the bike acrobats who did some stuff similar to the vid above. Not my vid, btw. But chk out 2:50. The show i saw had more stuff w/ people jumping and twisting through the main triangle while riding, which i thought was pretty awesome.

Anyhow, if you pop into town, i'm totally happy to chk out a show w/ you.

To Follow Up

Forgot to mention that in the end, the plane ticket prices listed were "fake", so we opted to train ride it in the end anyhow.

I did however have the insight that if Q was keen to splurge on a 5 star hotel, that it'd be worth the extra rmb to bump up to soft sleeper trains, which are 4 peeps to a cabin. Pretty cozy and nice, imo.

We had a quiet NYE on a train full of sleeping people.

Then a nice few days exploring Dalian despite some of the coldest weather i've dealt w/ in China. 6 layers? Not enough.

Q wanted to talk to this old guy who was about to spend the night on the sidewalk. "Can't you go home?" she asked, which i thought was very sweet, though it didn't yield any surprising results. We gave him a bit of money, and i gave him my hat. But seriously: if he really spent the night there, i suspect it was his last. Again, not so surprisingly, he seemed to be mentally ill.

Hey, it sucks to be homeless and freezing in Canada, but at least there's some sort of support systems to try and keep people from freezing to death on the streets. In China, i don't know what if any sort of systems exist.

So anyhow, we didn't take a plane.