Banpaku Park & the Flea Market

I'd heard about a flea market that was going to happen this weekend, and in an effort to secure some interesting things and/or souvenirs, tried to pin down the date/time/location. I found out that Lindzi had a flyer for it and decided to tag along. We (L, K and myself - Meaghan slept through everything, heh) left the dorms about noonish and headed to Banpaku Park. We met another Aussie girl named Rachel at the train station and she accompanied us. The park itself was the site of the 1970 world's fair and features a giant statue called Taiyō no Tō (The Statue of the Sun). The statue itself is really large and so highly visible from the road and the train. I'd seen the statue before as the train rumbled towards Suita campus, and had wondered what the hell it was, exactly. Here's a distance shot of Taiyō no Tō, who from this point on I'm affectionately calling Tato:

Tato is pretty strange. He reminds me of a creature out of a Miyazaki film. According to Wikipedia, Tato has three faces:

"...two faces on the front, and a face in the back. The face located at the top, whose diameter is 11 metres, represents the future. The face between two arms represents the present, and a black face on the rear of the tower is the sun of the past. The jagged red paintings on the front of the tower represent thunder."

To me, Tato is a little intimidating. He watches over the fairgrounds with all-seeing, all-encompassing eyes from his three faces. He greets you upon entry and his watchful eye is upon you until long after you exit the compound. Also, he's really quite huge. Here's some additional pictures:

Tato greeting us as we entered the park:

Kathryne standing in front of Tato, for scale:

Full-body shot:

A close-up of the face representing now:

The face on the back of Tato, representing the past:

But enough about Tato, he's not why we were at the park. We were there for the "giant" flea market! Now, it was a decently sized market, to be sure, but it's not really "giant" compared to the kinds of never-ending flea markets back in Texas. Most of the "stalls" (they weren't really stalls but generally things laid out on tarps or blankets) sold clothing, shoes and/or accessories, but there was some strange and interesting stuff, too. I did take a pic of the flea market:

Tato, keeping a close watch to make sure no one steals anything:

These guys were selling some interesting stuff, including a really old record player that was only ￥4,000:

There was also a guy doing some simple paintings and calligraphy for money, and I had him draw something up for me. I should have gotten more things done because he was pretty good, and it's a neat thing to have something that was made specifically for you, you know? There is one thing that absolutely haunts me, though. There was a beautiful, perfect, steam-punk style pocket watch. It was polished silver and had a small round window in part of the watch where you could see the gears going. It had etchings on the outside and it was just positively perfect. It was also ￥12,000 (about $150 USD) so I had to leave it behind, but damn I wish I could have bought that pocket watch, even if I'd never really wear it or anything. It was so cool.

I didn't buy much, really, just a few odds-and-ends. The girls bought some things (mostly clothes), and Rachel bought a fish bowl. It was pretty interesting to stroll the fairgrounds. There's not much else I can say about the flea market. It was a flea market; use your imagination. Although, I did take a picture of this sleeping bag that was for sale (for Andrew):

After we'd seen all we wanted to see, we decided to get some lunch at an Italian restaurant that Lindzi and Kathryne had discovered. Apparently you can get some kind of five-course meal for a measly ￥1,100 (about $13.50 USD). The place is called Saizeriya and it's located in one of the nearby train stations. Actually there are several locations because it's a chain. I took some pictures of the menu. The entire menu, heh. Like I've said, it's not the really obvious differences between cultures that is interesting, in my opinion it's the things we have in common but tweak to our own cultures that's interesting! You can download my photos of their menu as a .rar file here, if you're interested. That being said, I took some close-ups of things of interest... They serve escargot:

And some sort of pasta in a black sauce (the pasta itself isn't black, but the sauce is... I have no idea - I've been informed this is squid ink sauce):

In the end, I had neither the black pasta nor the escargot (though the escargot was tempting as all hell - being serious here, snails are delicious [sorry, Jes!]) and opted for a white-sauce pasta with spinach and bacon. I ordered the set, which came with a soup (clam chowder) and a salad. I also ordered some cheese bread and then for desert I had "tiramisu." I put tiramisu in quotes because it's not really tiramisu. It's more like tiramisu in ice-cream-cake form. Tasted great, though, so no complaints. Yum:

All in all, it was a pretty good day. I think we are going to hit up the flea market again in the future because it's a good way to spend a day. I have a couple more blogs that I need to post, namely about Den Den Town as well as Inari Shrine, so, as they say in Japan, LOOK FORWARD TO IT!

Toyonaka Campus, Indian food and Izakaya!

Okay, so the last few days have been an absolute blur, but I'm going to try to blog about it in individual posts instead of just slapping up 200 photos and a ton of text in just one post. Let's start on the 28th. The 28th was a Thursday, which means I had classes on campus from 8:50a-5:50p, which is my long haul for the week. I snapped some photos on my way to campus, because classes on most days are on Toyonaka campus (and you've only seen Suita, so far). We have a lovely park on campus (well, several actually, but here's some shots of one:

Japan is rife with little parks and I just love it. There's another area on campus that I wouldn't actually term a "park" per se, but there's a little bench in a semi-secluded, wooded area and it's just a nice peaceful place.

Looking up through the trees:

The weather is nice if a bit indecisive; most days have a combination of grey skies, blue skies, rain, warmth and cold. It's a bit difficult to plan for, but it could definitely be worse (for example, 93° F - 34° C... Not missing Texas summer quite yet).

I didn't pack a lunch mostly because I was lazy and wanted to sleep in. Luckily for me, neither Lindzi nor Kathryn had packed a lunch, so we dragged Meaghan off with us to find a place to eat off-campus. The walk was pleasant. We passed a shrine/cemetery of some sort:

The building had some nice detailed woodwork in the eaves:

We continued on and found the end of campus and the beginning of the urban area. There were a few places but I was completely sold when I saw an Indian restaurant. By this point I have had enough Japanese food to last several lifetimes and I wanted a break from the monotony. We went in and ordered the lunch special, a gigantic plate of curry for ￥500, which is an absolute steal in this part of the world. Kathryn impressed us all by eating all of hers, and half of a gigantic piece of naan which we split. By gigantic, I mean the naan was so large that they had to fold it in half to fit it on the (also large) plate.

Evidence!

That silver platter, above? That's what they had to fold the bread in half to fit it onto...

I always forget to take pictures of food before I eat it. I'll make up for that with more pictures of flowers! Don't say I never gave you anything.

The flower in the above picture is actually dead, but it maintained its shape so well and it looks like it's just some rare breed of rose, or something. I thought it was really pretty, despite being dead. I mean, to be fair, how many things remain attractive after they're dead? Not many. Not many.

We have a lake on Toyonaka campus:

And a nice wooded path alongside it:

A statue of... Something... Nice flowers, though!

There's a nice little sitting area:

I didn't get many pictures of the actual buildings or the classrooms because they pretty much look like any other college campus and classroom.

So, anyway, I am taking seven classes and one of those classes is called Introduction to Japanese Legal/Political System and Culture (many of the classes here have ridiculously long names). It is a mixed class, and by that I mean it's a class with both foreigners (ryuugakusei) and Japanese students. The Japanese students are almost all really shy. I think partially it's the language barrier and partially it's just easier to stay within your own culture (we do the same, really). So every semester, Setoyama Sensei has a party for his students at an izakaya. We all bought a ticket for ￥3,000 (about $37.00 USD) and this bought us three hours of all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink and karaoke.

So we bought our tickets at the end of class, finished out the day and met again at the classroom. Each ticket had a number on it which I assumed was used to track how many people would be going to izakaya. They trekked us off-campus and we followed Linda Galvan, who is the class TA (I have a pic of her somewhere, I think). Setoyama Sensei would be meeting us at the restaurant. We actually ended up going right past the Indian restaurant I'd eaten at earlier that day, which was fortuitous for me because I'd left my umbrella there.

We arrived at the restaurant, it was still daytime but I took these shots on the way out. Here's the sign for the restaurant:

Stairs leading up to it (did I mention there are a lot of stairs in Japan? There are a lot of stairs in Japan):

The lanterns above the doorway:

I was pretty worn out from classes and had been considering not going at all, but I am really glad I did. There were so many of us. We actually had three separate rooms to use. Upon arrival, we were told what the numbers on our tickets actually meant. They were seating assignments. Sneaky Setoyama Sensei had decided to divide us all up to ensure a good mix of ryuugakusei-to-Nihonjin ratio. He said that at least for the first hour or so, we were to honor the seating system, but after that we could split to different rooms or whatever. Each room had a seating space and karaoke machine, but that was for use only after dinner.

Speaking of dinner, the food was basically never-ending. It must've been like 20 courses, or something ridiculous like that because LONG after I was done eating (and drinking!), they continue to bring us food. There was fried octopus, cuttlefish, fried chicken, cabbage salad, edamame, fried rice, sushi, cucumber, (smoked?) salmon and I'm sure there is more that I can't remember. It just kept on coming!

They brought us a case of beer and it's worth noting that the bottles pictured below aren't standard 12-oz bottles but rather they are 16-oz bottles. I repeat: They brought us an entire case of 16-oz bottles of beer.

Along with that, there was tons of sake, umeshu (plum wine), mango-orange with some kind of liquor and basically anything else you wanted and as much of it as you wanted. I'm sure there was some gin and tonics in there, they are pretty popular here. We had ordered so much of the same stuff that instead of bringing us individual drinks, they brought several pitchers of each. Smart.

The room was packed, here's some shots of the crowd (bare in mind that we had two other rooms and though the other rooms were a bit smaller, they were likely pretty crowded as well):

That empty spot in the final picture is my spot :)

This is one of the smaller rooms (this pic was taken after we were allowed to shift rooms, so this room wasn't as crowded anymore):

And a grainy picture of Linda Galvan (who was hard at work TA'ing that night, tee hee - job's gotta have some perks):

And of course, Setoyama Sensei who is apparently some kind of karaoke GOD (seriously, this man loves his karaoke and can belt them out with ease):

Also, I think he might've been a bit tipsy in that photo, heh. Many of the folks of Asian persuasion (see what I did there?) turned red because of the alcohol. It's kind of interesting to see.

By 9pm, I had had enough fun for the evening and decided to head out. Meaghan felt similar. The restaurant is very close to a train station, but that line would have required a changeover at another station, and we didn't really want to deal with that. So, we headed back towards campus and tried to find the (very narrow) alley that led past the Indian restaurant and to campus. We asked a woman for directions to Osaka University's Toyonaka Campus, but she actually pointed us in the wrong direction. I think she thought we were trying to find Toyonaka city, because when we went the way she told us to, we saw a street sign that said "Toyonaka city, 4km." Whee. Then we stopped at a Lawson (a convenience store) and asked directions there. After some confusion, we got it. Go down a bit, take a right at the park. We found it and walked all the way across campus and down to the train station. I think we got back to the dorms at about 11pm, but I'm not 100% sure. I wasn't really stressing though, it was a nice night for a walk, in one of the safest countries in the world, and I certainly was in no hurry. We found out the following day that after our time was up at izakaya, many people went on to another bar or club. The trains quit running around midnight, and one girl had told me she intended to stay out late enough to catch the 5:45AM train in the following day. I'm too old for that, heh.

So, that was Thursday. Still have to blog about Friday and Saturday. Yeesh! Also, I plan to upload these and more pictures to my tumblr at some point. Key word here being plan. We'll see.

Edit: Oh yeah, I planned to leave you with some video of karaoke, so here's the crowd singing Love So Sweet by Arashi: