Day 12: Osaka
9 November 2006 – Moving south: Osaka.
We bid farewell to Kyoto and took a local train to Osaka today. We bought tickets and got on the train without having brekky. When we arrived at Osaka central station after 45 minutes, we started looking for our hotel, which was away from central. It took us a while as we had to “drag” our luggages around Osaka station to find our way. We stopped to have brekky before making another short subway trip to our hotel. When we got there, we were going the wrong way.
My first impression of Osaka is confusing and bad signage system. We were following a subway sign and all of the sudden, the sign disappeared; another example is the arrows are pointing the wrong direction. Finally, we found our hotel after asking a few locals. After we dropped our luggages off, we went to the gymnasium to try to buy tickets to see the volleyball games. Today, China vs Brazil. Luckily, there were non-reserved tickets left. We got in early to get good seats. So, we basically spent the whole day there.
We were still tired from our Kyoto’s trip so we appreciated a little rest in the gymnasium. We left the gymnasium at about 6pm as China were leading 2 sets to 1 to Brazil. They were in 4th set and we really needed to go back to the hotel to check in. So, I will find out the result on the net. We watched Japan played Turkey on TV. (*Later on, I found out that China lost the game to Brazil.)
