Travels and Tales

My last blog post! Wow! It may have taken me 3 days to get to writing it but I am writing it so I can say I successfully captured my whole trip.

I don't know if it was my intention when I booked my flights, but my flight Osaka -> Vancouver didn't leave until 7:20pm on the 2nd. Maybe I wanted to give myself that day in Osaka? But tbh the day of a flight (any travel, but for flights it's worse) I am almost inescapably stuck in "wait mode," where I don't really want to do much or know what to do in the hours before I have to be at the airport. My hostel checkout was 10am, and I had determined that the latest I wanted to be heading to the airport (~1hr transit) was 3:30. I had learned from my mistakes of taking the train to Kyoto station at rush hour, and did not want a repeat of this, even though I was sure I didn't need the whole 3 hours before the flight. I found a luggage storage place right around my hostel, which was conveniently also right by the train line to the airport. And best of all, it was dirt cheap! It ended up costing me only ¥150 (~$1.30CAD) to store my suitcase and backpack for the day. God bless the man that runs that place.

And, I was able to get all of my stuff packed up alright. I had scattered things all over my very small hostel room, and was a wee bit concerned with the bulky dress I'd bought and the souvenirs throughout. But I was mindful to buy only small souvenirs (no otomatone for me...), and on my way to Japan I had packed my daily purse folded up in my suitcase (which took up a decent amount of space), so I knew I would have a lot more space on the way back.

I had room to spare, which is great, because I still hadn't bought any snacks yet and I was determined to source some fun kitkats to bring home for my friends. After packing I had still about an hour until checkout so I headed downstairs for a coffee, then back up to strip the bedding and collect my items, triple checking I had everything on me!

I started off by sourcing breakfast. I guess I was really ready to be home, because I went to a very Western restaurant. They were serving up America-core in a Hawaiian way, in a very cute beach themed place, called "Limally Cafe." I sat at a whitewashed picnic table, and the restaurant was done up in blue and white shiplap with Hawaiian and more generally American snacks, posters, a ton of flags all over the ceiling. It felt very Americacore to also have my coffee served in a single-use cup and be given single-use cutlery even though I was eating in. I opted for scrambled eggs and avocado toast that I couldn't finish because they leaned into the American portions too, I think! It was delicious though, especially the avocado toast, I don't know what they mixed into it but it was really good.

One of the places I needed to hit up before I left the city was a specific pudding stall in Dotombori, since I missed it last time I was in the area. I could have transited there but it was only a half hour walk, and I had lots of time, so I ended up just walking there. I think I ended up walking down friggin Nerd Street or something, I was surrounded by stores with hundreds of gachapons, ones with claw machines, and many stores selling figures (anime, game, etc.). I also saw a bunch of fellow bedecorated young folks walking around with a million trinkets on their bags. None of the stores really interested me (not the kinds of games I play), but it was amusing to see!

Once I got to Dotombori, the pudding place wasn't open yet, so I went into the huge Don Quijote to get snacks and see if I could find some Hobbes-like slippers I'd seen at a different location. No luck on the slippers, but absolute success on the snacks! I was also extremely temped by a lot of the character goods they had (mostly Sanrio), the extremely fun looking otomotones (they were just too big to comfortably fit in my backpack unfortunately), and I went through the whole contact lens section to see if there was anything that I wanted. Not really, they were mostly different shades of brown, understandable, but I was looking more for green or blue or pink. They had some, but all seemed to be at most monthly, and I like to get yearly ones for my colour contacts. I was happy with the snack success though! I found 4 fun flavours of kitkats (matcha latte, strawberry cheesecake, sakura and soybean poweder, and peach) and some tasty sounding pocky (oranges from Ehime).

I realized once I got home that I should have bought more :( I had some more space in my backpack/purse, I wasn't sure since I didn't have my backpack on me; I'm glad I played it safe, but I could have fit more to share with more people! That's okay, only a few friends will get omiyage but I tried my best.

Finally, onto the hotly anticipated pudding. Lee Know from Stray Kids had specifically recommended this place, and indeed the small storefront had a bunch of pictures of him and his little character (a bunny called Leebit). The clerk kindly let me take a picture! I got 2 puddings, one that I ate right there (she had given me some small plastic spoons), and one I put in my purse for later. Not too much later, though, since they're supposed to be kept cold.

I wasn't sure what to expect since I hadn't had Japanese pudding before, but I would have called it a custard over a pudding. Maybe that's just a translation thing? Definitely could taste the egg in it, which in my opinion was a good thing. It was not too sweet, really hit the spot, and nice and light! I know some Japanese style puddings have a layer of caramel sauce on them which this one didn't, yet it didn't taste like it was missing anything. Thanks for the rec, Lee Know.

At a loss of what to do next (I had accomplished my grand pudding goals), I saw that I had bookmarked on the map nearby a store called Object. Here, you picked a canvas item (pouch, keychain, card holder, bag, basically anything) and then chose little patches to decorate it with, laying them out in a little tray. They had hundreds of patches! Also probably hundreds of objects to decorate. I decided to make a bunny-themed photocard holder for the bunny-themed idols I like, but then when I was walking around looking at all the patches I saw some teeny tiny worms that I really wanted to use. So, I grabbed a keychain strap to decorate with the theme of "critter picnic." I was basically giggling as I was laying that design out, having so much fun! It ended up being SO overpriced oh my god, you went to the cash for them to tally all your patches and pay before they ironed it, and I was gut punched by the price (you don't have to know), but I was committed. Oops. I did not pay attention to how much each patch cost. More than they're worth absolutely. It's fine, my things are stinkin cute.

The Korean text on the photocard holder (it was a Korean business) says "let's live cutely"! And I cannot stop looking at critter picnic. I love them. Absolutely worth it.

I had originally planned on a gyoza restaurant near my hostel/luggage storage for lunch, but I still wasn't hungry after breakfast so I passed that up (I would regret this later), and out of things to do I just... transited back to the area near the train station and tried to find a cafe to sit in for a bit. Two of the ones I had bookmarked claimed to be open, but when walking past them were extremely closed. I found one in the same arcade as my hostel and went in. Big mistake. This cafe allowed smoking indoors, and it was coated in the smell and also there was someone there actively smoking. But because of who I am as a person I felt too awkward to turn tail and leave, it was such a small place and I had already been greeted.. so I suffered through a coffee there and immediately went for a much needed walk to a nearby and underwhelming park (explicitly NOT going Tennoji Zoo which I'd seen rough reviews of). Japan has an extreme shortage of places to just sit outside, but I figured a park would have some benches (correct). I ate my second pudding here and felt like enough time had passed that I wouldn't be at the airport stupid early, so collected my bags and headed to the train station.

I was extremely careful about reading the signage to get on the right train, standing on the indicated platform and everything, but once my train left it 100% was going in the wrong direction. Easy enough to get off at the next stop and switch directions but like... why did all of the signs lie to me? As I was verifying the route while waiting on the now hopefully actually correct platform, my data on my eSIM ran out. Talk about impeccable time! Mere hours before the end of my trip! Hell yeah. So I trusted in the train and luckily this one was going the right way. Thanks to the announcements on board being in English I realized the train would be splitting at a stop a few before the airport, with half the train going to a different destination, so I switched cars. Phew! This is why I don't listen to music on public transit in unfamiliar cities. Could have had a pretty brutal detour in my trip. But I made it to Kansai Airport and by the time I got to the check-in location, my airline was just about to open the desks (it being around 4:15pm at this time I think). Despite checking in online I still had to use a machine to get my baggage tag before queuing to talk to a desk agent, but at least this machine did not thwart me! I always prefer to do things with real human employees since there's less chance of error. Alas. I cannot resist our machine overlords.

Security was fast, but the Kansai airport funnels you from security straight into the fragrance section of their duty free shopping area, brutal. And I had had my mask off to go through security. Y'all, I could taste it. I could taste so much horrible perfume. It was an attack. I speed walked through there and finally had the chance to change into a not sweaty shirt I had packed in my backpack, knowing the transit to the airport and security hullabaloo would make me wicked uncomfortable. After that I admitted that I needed to eat before my flight, and sought about finding something at the airport. This is what broke me.

The Kansai airport, in my eyes, was really determined to be a fancy airport. I had been assuming that with the prevalence of convenience stores across the entire country that I would be able to find something simple and easy to eat at the airport, and maybe use up the stored money on my Suica card. But noooo, Kansai airport is too good for that. They only had nice ass restaurants with "authentic Japanese foods" (meat) or upscale Western fusion restaurants (meat and seafood). I paced the entire terminal and came up empty for vegetarian options. I thought I was saved when I found an Italian place, and a red sauce pasta on their menu, but when I talked to the employees and asked if there was meat in it they checked their allergen list and it said there was pork and fish in it. What? That didn't make any sense. But they had the ingredient list... There were sad looking single slices of margherita pizzas in a prepackaged area, so I brought that over and asked about that, and they looked it up and also said it had meat in it. Surely not, right? I took a look at their allergen sheet and it had a full table of all of their items and the allergens, but it made no distinction between actual ingredients and possible cross-contaminations. I don't give a shit about cross-contaminations at this point. So I used my translation app to ask the staff if there was *actually* meat in the items or just the possibility of meat, and they adamantly told me there was actually meat in it. I had cased the entire terminal with all of the menus and there was nothing resembling dinner that I could eat. I will admit this turned into a moderately well controlled breakdown (controlled in that I made it to the bathroom first). I was just so tired from a long trip, and ready to start my journey home, and I had not had issues finding something to eat like this the entire time. It was really demoralizing and overwhelming (airports are challenging at the best of times).

After a bit I got it together and figured I'd be eating apple danishes for dinner or something. I headed back to one of the vaguely Western fusion places I had stopped at before since they had some pastries. As I went to buy it, I saw the menu they had on the counter at their cash registers was not the same one on their digital boards or the menu you could grab outside the restaurant area to look at - this one at the cash had a margherita pizza on it. I asked (somewhat tearfully) if this had meat in this, and the employee assured me that no, it was fully vegetarian. Y'all, I could have collapsed. I don't even like pizza. I did not want to eat the pizza. I had no choice. I ordered it, grabbed a cold tea from a vending machine, and (still tearfully) sat down. Once I got my pizza I pulled up a silly Ateez variety show on my phone to watch while I ate and reregulate myself. 100% the fact that I hadn't eaten enough that day contributed to how much the dinner struggle affected me. We were on our way to solving that problem though. Sure enough, after the mid tier pizza, the world felt a bit easier to bear.

Honestly, the flight itself was uneventful. We were a bit delayed in taking off (bad news for later), but I spent the flight reading (finally finishing that sci-fi book I hadn't touched since the flight to Japan, and making good progress on the 3rd book), playing Animal Crossing and Tears of the Kingdom, and listening to podcasts. Chill time. Not sleeping, on purpose to avoid any jet lag. The lady next to me had no concept of personal space and her elbow was constantly over the armrest into my seat area but I was not in the mood to say anything about it so I was quietly sulky. The 9 hour flight passed surprisingly quickly! And in the last little bit I got to enjoy looking out over the Rockies.

When the plane landed in Vancouver, I checked and I had just under 1hr until my flight for Victoria left (at 1:30pm). Uh oh. But surely that's enough time because customs coming into Canada is always fast. And I was sat in the first Economy row so I was going to get off the plane quickly. And I have long legs so I can walk fast. Sure my legs were stiff after that flight, but not as bad as they could have been, because I got the extra leg room. This is what I told myself even as we had to wait a few minutes to taxi up to a gate, watching the time tick by. My stress increased slightly when I could turn my Canadian service back on, and saw that my flight was due to finish boarding at 1:15. Oh no. I indeed speed walked as fast as I could off the plane and through customs. What I was not expecting was needing to go through security again. We had just gotten off a plane, that we could only board after going through security, we hadn't gotten our bags, and we had to go through security again. Bonkers? It was incredibly clogged up, with only 1 out of 3 lanes staffed, and already a decent line by the time I got there.

As it turns out, there were approximately 4-6 connecting flights all leaving around 1-1:45pm. When I got to the security line, it was around 12:50, so people were shitting bricks. The other passengers around me were muttering about it, and some passengers were trying to skip ahead of the line, citing a flight departing soon. Those were met with "yeah, us too." Even the staff tried to help some folks to the front of the line, but I guess other passengers said something, because she asked the crowd "do any of you have a connecting flight leaving in the next half hour?" and we all said "YES!" It was chaos. They opened another lane but of course could only move so fast. My personal struggle was getting my fairly tight (and not zippered) doc martens off my feet (back on was even worse) since they had swollen on the flight, despite my compression socks. As soon as those suckers were on I was outta there. I was half speed walking, half jogging towards my gate, it now being like 1:10pm. I glanced at a display to ensure I was still going to the right gate, and my flight said "final call." Oh god. Well, I can check "running for a flight" off my bucket list, despite it never being on there in the first place. I don't run! My arthritis makes that mighty clear! I even asked one of the airport cars without any passengers for a ride but they said they were going somewhere else. Okay. I didn't, like, sprint because I am not well enough for that, but I did run at as fast a pace as I could. Boy am I grateful I've been doing fitness classes 3x a week since September. I still showed up to my gate sweaty as fuck (so much for that fresh shirt earlier in the day), out of breath, and frazzled, but I made it onto the plane. Wicked embarrassing to be one of the last passengers on in that state. They don't know it wasn't my fault :( I did everything right :(

I was convinced I'd be the last passenger on the flight since it was 1:15 now, but obviously the staff had gotten word about the situation with the incoming flights. Apparently there was also an incoming flight from Edmonton that was delayed, what a mess. So we were waiting on the tarmac for 10 minutes past departure time for other passengers. A few others made it, and man, these people were just strolling at a leisurely pace towards the plane! Not frazzled or sweaty at all! Apparently "last call" has a different meaning or urgency for different people. Wack. Anyway, they loaded up a few standby passengers, and we ended up taking off fully 20 minutes behind schedule. Not that it really mattered, because the Vancouver -> Victoria flight is literally 10 minutes. Melody was picking me up and even though the original arrival time was 1:50pm I had told her 2pm anyway since I know things can take some time deplaning and everything. I didn't make her wait too much thankfully! We did wait at the baggage carousel for a while, no sight of my suitcase, which I suspected would be the case. If I barely made it onto that flight, the chances of my bag making it... slim. I ended up filling out a delayed baggage claim and hoped it would get delivered to me soon.

We were also picking up Lily from the ferry terminal (very close to the airport) since they got in at a similar time to me. Lily, Melody, and their third roommate Gillian were who was looking after Hobbes! So once we collected Lily, we went to their house so I could reunite with my cat.

I missed him so much!! It's always so nice to see him again. After petting him for a bit and chatting with the housemates, Melody and I packed up all Hobbes' stuff into her car (man, I can get a feel for what traveling with toddlers must be like), and then she drove me to my house for which I am extremely grateful. Hobbes was sulking for a while when I got home, initially wouldn't even come out of his carrier (unusual for him). I think he had a very fun time at my friends' house and he really hates being transported between places. It took him a few hours to come around... part of this complicated by the fact that I discovered my fridge had broken and needed replacing, so my landlords were in moving it around and taking it apart (Hobbes is pretty sensitive to banging/the sound of moving stuff). What a friggin day, the fridge was an unpleasant surprise.

To my landlords' credit (they are the best people ever, proven time and time again), as soon as I told them the fridge was broken they came down to measure it and go buy a new one. It had been running warm just before I left but we were pretty sure it was fixed, so the fact that it truly broke again meant it was time to replace. I set about taking everything out of the fridge and freezer. I didn't have much in the fridge since I had just been away, mostly sauces and such (including a basically brand new thing of doenjang...). I did however have a lot in the freezer, which was a bummer. I needed to borrow some compost bags from my landlords to get everything emptied out, leaving washing containers and baggies for tomorrow. Maybe not the fresh start I wanted or needed, but it did mean I got rid of stuff that had been in my freezer untouched for months. And the sauces/condiments/jams of mysterious age. I took my chances on keeping some of my pickled items and less perishable condiments (soy sauce, lime juice, etc), but most of it was thrown out :( bit of a pain! But then my landlords could remove it from the unit and bring in the fridge they had just bought, which had to stand for 24hrs before being plugged in.

In all of this, though, my suitcase arrived! I guess on the next flight. That's one win. After doing some light unpacking, and showering before my landlords were in with the new fridge, I finally laid down in the den with Hobbes to comfort him as he was looking quite unsettled. I was barely keeping my eyes open but couldn't go to sleep until my landlords finished. By the time they let me know they were done until tomorrow, around 9:45pm, I was drifting in and out of sleep (definitely gonna need to rewatch that episode of Make Some Noise). I finally got to bed around 10pm, having lived through March 2nd two times and being awake for (I think, by my calculations) approximately 30 hours. Not the most ideal day (days?), but I was home, with my cat and all my stuff, and nearly a functional fridge.

What a rollercoaster! A wild end to an extremely exciting trip. I am so glad my travel trials and tribulations came at the end, rather than on the way to Japan. I'm very grateful that the entire trip, things mostly worked out. I had so many incredible and new experiences, saw SO much, spent time with friends I hadn't seen in years, met a lot of really great people, and exhausted myself in the best of ways. There's gotta be a reason it's a canon event for millennials in their 30s to go to Japan, right? I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, and hope I get to go back soon. I've wanted to go for so long! I'm lucky to be in a career that allows for (enables, even!) travel like this, at a job flexible enough to spend almost 3 weeks away, and have friends willing and eager to take care of my cat for that long. There's only so many ways I can say I had fun, but really, I had so much fun!!

I have a few photo dumps below this post of my Kodak Charmera pics that I finally managed to get off of it now that I have my own laptop again, they're comically/cutely low resolution, and it was super fun looking at them all afterwards! Having no idea how they'd turned out was giving big disposable camera vibes. I think they have a certain charm (hah) to them though.

Thank you for reading along, whether you followed my whole journey or only bits and pieces. It makes me really happy to hear that people have been enjoying this blog. It's something I started mostly for myself, to make sure I have record to look back on (I've never done well with physical journaling), but I'm glad I can share with my friends and family as well.

My last full day in Japan! How did that happen so fast?? Today was dedicated to my biggest splurge of the whole trip: Super Nintendo World! And Universal Studios since SNW is inside of Universal, but tbh I don't care about anything else at Universal (Jaws, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter World). So I was mostly going for SNW, my visit very much aided by a Christmas gift from my brother and sister-in-law. My ticket to SNW had an entry time of 11:50, but I wanted to get to the park a bit earlier to ride a few rides in the Jurassic Park area. Even if I've never seen the movies I can still enjoy the rides! I had a quiet coffee in the hostel common area, one of the few people up, and headed out a bit after 9:30. It was only about a 30min transit. I had made sure to bring only a small bag knowing how busy it would be and that I'd have to keep it out of the way on most of the rides, but once I got to Universal I did store my coat in a coin locker. It was around 12°C and sunny, and I was guaranteed to get too warm in the coat. It worked out for the most part, other than the fact that my hands were kind of cold! This was not aided by the fact that I rode a water(ish) ride first thing...

Of course the park was busy, but I had come equipped with my Loop earplugs, a mask, and sunglasses. Three talismans to ward me against crowds. It was perfect, thanks to those I was so completely unbothered. I also had been mentally preparing myself the whole trip for how busy it was going to be, it wasn't exactly a surprise.

The reason I rode a water(ish) ride first was because the line was very short, and I wanted to do what I could in the hour and a bit until my SNW entry time. There were of course warnings that you could get wet, but I don't think I realized how much...? But when I got to the front of the line and prepared to board the ride, and noticed water on the seats... Uh oh. No turning back. It was a cool ride, took you through a river past a bunch of animatronic dinosaurs, and then inside through the research/holding facility. The plot I guess was that some of the dinosaurs in the facility were breaking loose and causing danger. It was a pretty loud ride with all the alarms and dinosaurs screeching, but I had taken my earplugs out because of the water, so I settled for just plugging my ears. The big descent of the ride, after we left the facility, was where I got hugely splashed! I got some of the worst of it being on the outside edge of the raft. The Japanese family next to me was laughing with me as I was coming to terms with how soaked I got! The fact that I was wearing all black was some consolation, and at least I had had the forethought to take off my mask too. I also reasoned with myself that at least I had the whole day to walk around and dry off, rather than doing it at the end and being damp on the transit home!

After that I went to the "Flying Dinosaur" ride, just beside the one I had just ridden. My SNW entry ticket also came with express entry to the Mario rides and then either this Jurassic Park ride or a Jaws one, and Sabine had said the Jurassic Park one was really good, so! I could see people on it as I was walking around that area of the park and it looked incredible. It's a coaster that has you lying down on your stomach to ride it. They have one like this at Canada's Wonderland (near Toronto), and it's one of my favourite coasters there! By luck of the draw I ended up in the very front row with two extremely afraid Japanese girls and a scared but excited Filipino guy. It was so much fun!! It has probably been like 6-7 years since I was on a rollercoaster (despite thinking about it every time I'm back in Toronto), and I had forgotten how much I love them. It was very thrilling, going through loops and barrel rolls. Also as it brought us up to the top of the first drop, we had a great view across the whole park and the city beyond it! On a really beautiful clear day too. Here's a pic of some of the coaster track from across the park:

My hands were quite cold after first getting soaked and then being flown at 100km/h at 150 feet up (literally, I looked up the speed), but that was the only con about the ride. Oh, that and I was afraid I'd lose my glasses. The staff during the lineup and scanning process kept miming for me to take them off (we went through metal detectors to ensure nothing was left in our pockets and had to demonstrate to many staff that we had nothing on us) but every time I said "I can't see without them" and they just told me to be careful. I settled with wrapping my mask elastics around the arms of the glasses like 4 times each side, and it did the trick! Phew. I did have my sunglasses, but it wouldn't have been fun to lose my regular ones.

After finishing that ride there was only about 15mins until the entry time for SNW, so I sat on a bench to rest my legs a bit, knowing I was going to be on my feet for a while in SNW. This ended up being a wise choice. When I entered SNW, I mostly said "fuck it" to being careful of other people in my photos; it was obviously impossible, and no one going there doesn't know to anticipate everyone's going to be taking pictures. It was so, so exciting, immediately upon entering! You walked through a big green pipe that played the classic noise when Mario travels through the pipe, and then through Peach's castle (complete with giant pictures on the wall), before being greeted by the amazing vista of Super Nintendo World. Seeing it in photos was one thing, but actually getting to be there and take it all in was bonkers!!

A whole bunch of the props were moving around, the coins all spinning, piranha plants reaching out, thwomps crashing down, the whole nine yards! I can't truly explain how much it felt like actually walking into a video game with how bright, animated, and oversized everything was. The bright blue sky we were blessed with really helped sell it too, I am glad I got to see it all in the sunshine. The area was also filled with people with these power bands (I didn't get one, they were like $45) that allowed you to interact with parts of the park, like punching blocks to get coins (made the noise and I think virtually gave points on the smartwatch-esque thing), finding hidden(ish) symbols around the area, and playing little minigames (all of the minigames had lineups so I'm extra glad I didn't bother with a band. better for kids I'm sure).

I did a round of the top level, stopping to admire and take pictures of everything, before heading into the Mario Kart ride. I realized after I had ridden it that I forgot to tell the staff I had an express pass and did not need to wait as long as I did, oops, but the wait really wasn't that bad anyway. One of the benefits to being there by myself was getting to use the singles lines which tended to move a bit faster. The entrance was through Bowser's castle and had the lines snaking through the interior of the castle, surrounded by torches and chains and dungeon-esque decor with some enemy animatronics around the walls. All of the staff for each different area of the park and ride had a different kind of uniform, which was SO fun, and the staff here had racing suits on, they looked awesome!

Everyone got given these Mario hat headbands to wear during the ride, because once you boarded you snapped some goggles onto them which revealed an AR (augmented reality) viewscreen in front of you. They were clear goggles with bright images depending on where you looked. I had no idea this was a feature of the ride!! Each kart contained 4 riders in 2 rows and everyone had a steering wheel with two buttons on the shoulders (as far as I could tell, the buttons both had the same function). When you looked down towards the steering wheel you could see how many coins (points) you had, and how many blue shells (ammo) you had. Once the ride started, you were given a very quick tutorial on how to use the buttons to shoot at enemies/other players, and you aimed by looking towards them. The steering was not a true function of the ride, we were on a track, but to make it more immersive. The entire cart would spin around as we steered around corners. It was a bit overwhelming because I kind of wanted to look more closely at the track we were going through, but I had to focus on the enemies I was trying to hit! You also had to look at the item blocks as they came towards you to collect more blue shells (even though they were blue they functioned like green shells). I was having SO much fun that I started tearing up at one point, which is really silly, but I just felt so happy that I could be here having this experience! I'd been wanting to go since SNW opened in 2021, and it was pretty surreal finally being there.

At the end of the ride you could see every rider's score (I guess based on the amount of people you hit and items you collected). I didn't win but I wasn't last! Somewhere around 10 out of 16. When you disembarked you walked through the back of the castle, surrounded by the badges from the Grand Prix circuits from the game, and then into a gift shop (of course). Even the gift shop had a cool design, like a gear/repair place. I picked up a few things (secret!) before heading to the rest of SNW.

The main part of SNW was two levels, so I went down the stairs to see more from different angles. Mario and Luigi were hanging out down here for photo-ops, as was Toad! Toad in particular was super cute and had a minder with him as he was wandering around. You had to feel kind of bad for the person in the suit.

Next, I went to the Donkey Kong Country side of SNW! I haven't actually played any of the Donkey Kong games but of course the park was just as well done as the Mario area. Tons of palm trees everywhere and jungle-style decor and props, and the man (gorilla?) himself was there too.

I had an express entry to the ride here too, Mine Cart Madness. The interior line area was all done up in gold, a very fancy temple, with vines hanging down along the path. The plot of this one was zooming through the jungle in a janky cart, preventing the Golden Banana from being stolen by ?Tiki Taks? I'm sure this made more sense to people who have played the games. The ride itself was pretty fun, I didn't know but the cars had a kind of herky-jerky movement to them which was a little hard on the neck (being warned about it ahead of time might have been nice), but that was part of the concept. Some parts of the track it took you through were visibly broken as well, so they really leaned into the unpredictable speed over these bits! This one also had nice views over the other parts of SNW, and all the statues and jungle themed parts along the ride were cool. Some sections even misted you, I'm guessing to mimic a humid jungle?

In this area of the park I'd seen people walking around with these incredible ice cream things, and figured I had to at least get one overpriced themed food while in SNW. Most of the food stalls were heavily meat-based (hot dogs etc) and the restaurants had quite long lineups, so a sundae it was! I also can't pass up banana flavoured treats, I love that shit. As it turns out it was banana soft serve topped with waffle pieces, granola, fruit sorbet (possibly strawberry and lemon?), and popcorn! A bit of everything. It was super delicious and refreshing, since I was getting quite warm in the sun (entirely dried off by now!)

I found a seat on a bench next to a guy who was clearly exhausted, I'm guessing waiting for his family to be done a ride, and an older woman whose family was off waiting for a photo with Donkey Kong. After a little while she struck up a conversation with me, which was difficult considering she did so in Japanese, but I knew enough words to know she was asking where I was from, how old I am, how long I was here, where I'd been to in the park and such. She showed me some pictures of her family enjoying other areas of the park, I told her where else I'd gone in Japan, she asked if there was snow in Takayama (thanks Fruits Basket for making me know the word for snow, "yuki"). I eventually finished my ice cream and remembered to introduce myself to her before we parted ways (her name was Yumiko!). It was a wholesome little rest in my noisy, chaotic day!

I went back to the Mario side of SNW to ride Yoshi's Adventure, a more kid-oriented ride. I didn't have an express ticket for this one and it was claiming a wait of 80 minutes... so I thought about not doing it... but I was there to experience it all! Fuck it! Whatever! I'd be upset if I didn't do one part of the park. Parts of the line went through a cutely decorated area (the Yoshi games really knock the cuteness level outta the park), but it was a long enough line that for a section we wound through an unremarkable concrete and metal outdoor section between two buildings. I pulled out my phone and worked on drafting my blog post from the day prior which helped pass the time (idk why doing that makes me feel like I'm time traveling/teleporting but it really does). It was mostly fine, other than my knees starting to ache and the two boys behind me having basically no concept of the space they took up, since they kept bumping into me. I tried to have patience for it since they were only like 7 or 8, and were also clearly bored by the long wait, so I didn't chastise them but I did kind of wish their parents had told them to mind the people around them. Ah well, I put it out of my mind as best as possible.

The ride itself was very chill. There was a constantly looping track oh Yoshi-shaped carts that took you on a leisurely path, through a very small indoor section with a Kamek and some Shy Guys flying around before heading outside, above the Mario section of the park. The pace was slow enough that you really got the chance to see everything from up on high! And because it was slow, I could take some pictures (not very good ones mind you, the video I took was better).

Once the ride had finished I did one more round of the Mario side of SNW. I looked in the other merch store they had (that wasn't attached to the Mario Kart ride) on the hunt for Waluigi merch - they didn't have a single thing! Zero Wario or Waluigi representation at all. They had other villains/enemies like Bowser, Boo, Koopas, Bullet Bills, etc., and the even had misfit Pikmin in the stores, but no Wario or Waluigi. Wild! Are they just not cared about at all in Japan?? I was a little sad about that. My boy... Anyway, I continued to walk around until I felt like I had really gotten my fill ow SNW, knowing it will be a while before I'm back here (if ever).

On my way out of Universal, I thought about riding one of the other coasters in the Hollywood section, but it was a substantial wait and my knees were feeling the effects of the Yoshi line. I had planned ahead and brought my cane with me, which helped a bit once I whipped it out, but that much standing is really no bueno so I was in some pretty rough shape. I poked into the Hello Kitty store, as well as other general Universal stores still looking for Waluigi, but struck out again. Time to go home. It was around 4pm by the time I left the park, so a full day there! The walk to the train station was slow and painful, but I made it in the end. I knew if I went to my hostel first, and up to my room on the 3rd floor, I would not be making it back down again. But I desperately needed food, having not really had any options at the park and a light breakfast. So I stopped at a Nepalese place by the subway station closest to my hostel, and got a mixed plate and a lassi, knowing at this point any alcohol would take me out.

It was all delicious! Curry, soup (dal baht), and some vegetable side dishes. The one at the bottom of the picture was pickled radish, and it was so good! I was sad I only had a few pieces of it! On my way out I asked the staff what it was (so I could find it elsewhere or try making it myself), and later I searched for recipes for khadeko mulako achar. We'll see if it turns out anything like what I had!

A few streets down from the restaurant was a sento that was apparently also tattoo friendly, and sounded like something I could really use after a long day and with my sore, swollen knees. I toddled over and verified that indeed I was allowed in, scrubbed down (they provided the soap and shampoo at this one which was nice, and the towel I rented was nice and fluffy), and spent just over an hour there. The main hot bath was almost uncomfortably hot so I didn't spend a ton of time in it. They also had an electric bath, with 3 different settings, and placards (including English) explaining the different settings and where the electricity came for each of the 3! It was might strong though, much stronger than the one in Kyoto, so I could only tolerate putting my legs in on the gentlest setting. They had what was called a "starlight bath" but it wasn't actually outside? It was through a door into a cooler room, done in wood rather than tiling, with a few small skylights, and then small lights scattered around the rest of the ceiling to make it look starry. There was a small cold bath (very cold but nice for dunking in when I overheated), some lounge chairs (adirondack style and also long, curved pool loungers), and what ended up being my favourite bath. It was a nice temperature, not too warm, and labelled the "microbubble" bath. It felt like sitting in warm soda! In a good way? Not super bubbly soda like Coke, but a more gentle effervescent bubble like sparkling water. The water was slightly opaque too, it really reminded me of Milkis (a Korean carbonated yogurt flavoured milky soft drink - look, it sounds weird, but it's good). I spent most of the time alternating between this bath and one of the loungers. I'd seen other guests smartly splash the loungers with warm water from the bath before sitting on it so it wasn't cold, and there was a large cup next to the baths just for this! There was a fan running in this room to keep it cool as well.

It was really a great decision to come here after the day I had had, and I left feeling much better. The changeroom even had some nice moisturizer to use, and when I went to the rest area in the lobby I found they had some drink options, so I went for a plum sour (made with shochu, a Japanese distilled liquor) so I sat on the tatami section of the rest area and drank that to cool down.

After that, it was a quick stop at the convenience store for a crunchy snack and a beer to drink once I got back to the hostel while writing up my blog. When I got there there was a young Japanese boy working on some English homework with I presume his relative (or maybe just a friend), he was doing a great job working through translations of sentences. I sat and just wrote up some of the previous day's post on my phone, but I didn't last long, extremely sleepy by this point. I resolved to wake up by 8am the next day to ensure I could have time to pack everything and drink a coffee before 10am checkout. I was a little worried about fitting everything in my bags well, but it was absolutely a tomorrow problem.

I'm so glad I could go to Universal Studios, and also very glad I left it for my last full day, because it wiped me out so bad! I'm quite happy that the way home from the park was the only time I needed my cane all trip. It is absolutely due to the fitness class and yoga I've been doing since September. As it turns out, it really does help. Along with my meds increase to treat the emergent arthritis in my hands, which will obviously help the arthritis elsewhere too. I'm just really proud of myself, and happy that my illness is well-controlled enough now that I can spend 3 weeks walking so much almost every day and way more active than I am in my daily life, and be pretty okay about it! I absolutely would have had a harder time even 5 years ago, when it was less well managed. God bless modern medicine, and myself for actually committing to my own wellness as I've gotten older. A bit of a tangent, but it was really on my mind the whole trip!

Only one more post left, of my actual last day and the (spoiler alert) trials and tribulations of my trip home. That's being a bit dramatic, but it wasn't the easiest day (or two days depending on how you look at it). That's why it's taken me some time to get this post up... but I did it!!

I had planned for today to be pretty laid back, knowing that I am going to tire myself out at Universal Studios on my last day. So I had a slow morning, eventually rolling out of bed to seek out breakfast. A blog I had read (not the food itinerary one but a different one) recommended this restaurant on Café Street near Namba station (yes, apparently that's a thing!) so off I went for some pancakes! This was also on the way to Umeda station, my next destination.

The restaurant was called Café Mog Namba, and they had so many different pancake options!! Some other food too, but who cares when there's pancakes on the menu. I went for tiramisu pancakes and a coffee, doubling down on the coffee taste. The table next to me had ordered it and it didn't look like that much food, so I added an extra pancake to my order. Well...it seems that the other table had gotten the smaller sized pancakes, and when mine arrived, it was 4 massive pancakes!

The photo doesn't do them justice. Around the edge of the plate was espresso syrup that was fairly bitter, a nice contrast to the decadent sweetness of the pancakes. The mascarpone was so fluffy and delicious, but it hid a surprise - vanilla ice cream underneath it? Unsure as to why. I could have done without the ice cream tbh, I was kind of struggling with the sweetness by the end of the meal! It was still very good though. I probably would have been fine with just the 3 pancakes!

Very caffeinated for the time being, I didn't go to anywhere else on café street. I'll save it for next time! Then I was on my way to Umeda station with a very specific goal: the Pokémon Center. I had to go for my nephews! It was a little confusing navigating from the station to the store, since this part of Osaka has what I assume is an extensive underground city. And as mentioned previously, I cannot navigate underground to save my life. My strategy is always Get Outside as Fast as Possible and work from there. Even tho google tried to help me by telling me what exit to take, and signage is pretty good, it just wasn't gonna happen. After emerging into daylight again, I learned that it wasn't going to be a simple ground floor storefront. It was on the 13th floor of a huge department store called Daimaru! Wuh oh, also not my favourite experience. I had anticipated that the Pokémon Center would be overwhelming so at least I had brought my Loop earplugs. After a few wrong attempts I got the right elevator up. What I was not anticipating was how much of an Affair the Pokémon Center was. That's on me, since it is the 30th anniversary and they just announced new games. Once I got out of the elevator, I got an entry time ticket. For 2 hours later! Wow!

The Nintendo store was also on this floor, as was a toy store I wanted to look at for my nephews too. So I spent some of that waiting time drooling over everything at the Nintendo store. Or, at least the Animal Crossing merch, all of it was suuuuper cute! Way cuter than what I had seen at the Nintendo store in NYC two years ago!! A bunch of it was in these great pastel colours with the romanization of the Japanese name for AC New Horizons, Atsumare Dobutsu no Mori.

I really wanted so much of the AC stuff!! The housewares were especially cute but I simply don't have room for that. Probably for the best. It's already going to be challenging with what I did get! I'm grateful I kept my shopping pretty light up to this point, it meant I still had fun money left. The Legend of Zelda merch was honestly disappointing, not much stuff and most of it kind of lame (to me at least). I picked up a few things, went to the toy store, and still had some time left until I was allowed in the Pokémon Center. I had a headache coming on, and was feeling the effects of being inside surrounded by many people, so tried to escape to the outdoors for a snack.

I sat outside for a bit to recover, and then braved the underground city again in search of an iced coffee, since I didn't want to stray too far and most of the cafes seemed to be inside. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a bakery chain recommended in that foodie itinerary! It wasn't the location they had mentioned, and I hadn't had the chance to go there yet. What luck! The chain is called Painduce (soft bread??) and functioned like the Chinese bakeries in Toronto I went to so often - get a tray and tongs and pick out what you want from a wide array of options. Everything was very clearly labeled if it was vegetarian or vegan! It wasn't so clearly labeled in English with what it was, so I went by visuals. I picked out 3 savoury buns and 2 sweet ones (and proceeded to not take a photo of a single one). I sat at the small amount of bar seating they had to eat one of the savoury buns and drink my iced coffee. It truly rejuvenated me. The bun I had was ?green onion and cheese? Maybe leek? It was good though and the place ended up being a great spot to sit and start drafting my blog post from the day prior. I find it better to pick away throughout the day rather than sit down and write it all at the end, it's less daunting that way. I also manage to like, get in the zone, and then waiting doesn't feel so much like waiting as it does time travel.

Before long it was approaching my entry time, 2:00. Not quite the quick trip and relaxing afternoon at the hostel I had planned! I navigated back upstairs and waiting around until it was my time to queue. The staff were doing a great job with crown control, all things considered. I was peeking around the store before I got in looking at what they had. My youngest nephew's favourite Pokémon is Lickitung, which is not exactly common, or likely to have merch of (thanks to the older one for liking Pikachu). Luckily I had asked my sister for some backup options. When I got in there, I scoured the store for Lickitung. They had a plushie of its evolution, Lickilicky, but no Lickitung! I did manage to find bits and pieces, but no spoilers to my sister and brother-in-law. I also got myself a very pretty Jigglypuff necklace, of all things!

Finally done with my big shopping, I went back to the hostel. I thought about stopping back in Dotombori for the pudding recommend by Stray Kids' Lee Know, but I was tired of being on my feet. I wanted to get back and be horizontal as quickly as possible. The trains on the way back were a bit crowded so I ended up quite warm upon my return, and I wanted to get blogging on my laptop, so I dropped my coat and bag in my room and descended back down with a snack (more of the buns and a Calpico drink) and the laptop to go sit in the hostel garden for a bit. It was really a lovely vibe! The weather wasn't the nicest, as it was pretty windy, but this meant not many people were out there. I had been told by someone at the hostel that cats like to hang out in the garden, but I suppose it was too cold for them. I stayed out there for only about 15 minutes before the wind was making my hands too cold.

When I went back to the common lounge area, there was the man I had been talking to yesterday (Muri? Muzi? His name starts with an M but I don't know more than that). He asked how my day had been and told me another one of the people there sitting with him was from France (since yesterday he had learned that I speak French). I ended up sitting down with them, and the old Japanese woman they were with (I was also told her name but forgot - Yamanoto I think, and then her first name started with an S and was two syllables, maybe Shomei or something?? I am so bad at this). She was in her late 80s and spoke no English, but was still so friendly and nice and tried to talk to me the whole time! My friend Muzi(?) was doing his best to translate, and I ended up talking a bit more to the French man as well (but im English). I think his name started with a J... Whoops. He was from the southeast of France and we talked a bit about the difference cities I've been to across France. Muzi and the French man (we're just rolling with it) kindly offered me some sake but I declined, and Muzi got me some tea instead since my hands were still quite cold. I put my computer aside and just talked to them for a bit! The lounge had a bunch of blankets too, helping me to warm up. I was sitting there with them from around 3:45-5:45, longer than I had intended maybe (still hadn't been horizontal yet), but isn't this what I stayed in a hostel for? We talked about where Yamanoto-san was from and her life, Muzi shared about his struggles growing up, and the French guy and I mostly listened, but I did ask him about his travels; he had been in Japan for a month by that then. Yamanoto-san gifted me a tissue holder she had made, apropros of nothing!! Wow! Also at one point Muzi was digging in his coin purse for something, and both Yamanoto-san and I pointed at it saying it was cute (it was a pink My Melody purse, at odds with Muzi's whole vibe otherwise), and then he just gave it to me?? I tried giving it to Yamanoto-san but she wasn't having it and insisted I took it. So I got two presents without even trying to! I felt bad that I didn't have anything to offer in return. But Muzi explained to me that in Japanese culture, refusing a gift that was given to you in good faith was rude, and that I should stop fussing and just accept it!

At some point there were pancakes shared as well, though I had had my fill at breakfast! After a bit Muzi took off, and the French guy went to go pack up his stuff (he was flying to Nepal that evening, for 3 months). When conversation died down a bit I opened my laptop again to draft a bit, and showed Yamanoto-san some of my photos from the aquarium. It was a lot of us pointing at things and saying "kawaii," "sugoi" back and forth but you know! It works! The hostel serves a group dinner at 6 but I had other plans for dinner, so I went upstairs a bit beforehand to leave the table for those who would be enjoying dinner, and said farewell to Yamanoto-san. Finally, I laid down for a bit, abandoning my blog for the time being. Of course I could have gone upstairs at any point, but I was enjoying the conversation!

Following my short rest, I walked about 7 minutes down the same arcade my hostel was in towards dinner: Shinsekai Paprika Shokudo, a vegan and gluten free restaurant. Found myself, not from any blogs! The foodie itinerary had suggested a few stalls to get kushikatsu, a local street food of breaded and deep fried skewers, which are often meaty. So the blog mentioned a few stalls that had good vegetable options, but fried in the same oil. This led me to looking for more kushikatsu, and I found this dedicated vegan place! All the better. They also had "takoyaki" on the menu, breaded octopus balls, but made with oyster mushrooms. I really was sad that I couldn't eat takoyaki since they're such a classic Japanese food (in that I see them everywhere and in media all the time). I was so happy to find this restaurant! It was tucked away down an alley but had a bright neon sign saying VEGAN, and I was confident I had found the right place. It wasn't very busy thankfully since it was a pretty small space! Maybe because I was there only an hour and a half before close. I ordered a combo of takoyaki, 5 pieces of kushikatsu, mini cinnamon donut holes for dessert, and a beer.

Holy heck it was all delicious! The takoyaki were nice and soft, and the kushikatsu had a very light breading, didn't have a greasy feeling to them at all. They were also served with a bottle of sweet sauce and I could put on as much as I wanted (I wanted a lot). The skewers I got were potato, cauliflower, some spongy soy meat situation (tasty), shiitake mushroom, and a wedge of camembert. The camembert was unexpected! But so good! And I wasn't expecting to enjoy the shiitake skewer because I don't really like that kind of mushroom, but they were actually a great texture. And the mini donuts felt like a taste of home, though they were so much better than any Timbits I've had. I am really pleased with how easy it has been to find vegetarian restaurants here, especially in the neighbourhood I'm staying in! As it turns out it was only a little bit difficult in Nagoya but every other city has been fine.

After dinner I came back to the hostel and went right upstairs to settle in for the night, too tired to shower and figuring I'd have to the next morning anyway since my bedhead is serious these days. I did get my blog post from the day before written up though! All in all not quite the chill day I had envisioned from the morning, but I think I'm just not destined to have chill days here! I'm too committed to doing as much as I can! I'm surely going to crash once I'm back, but I have my upcoming birthday to keep me going at least.

Today was such a great day! I slept in a bit and lazed around in bed until around 10 before having a shower and heading down to the hostel's shared kitchen to make some coffee and drink a smoothie I bought yesterday. I was looking around confusedly in the kitchen until a staff kindly pointed me in the direction of the guest kitchen (as opposed to the staff one); I feel like there can be a semi-high barrier to entry with hostels because they're simultaneously so casual but also are shared spaces with rules, that you don't necessarily get given the run down for. Regardless, I made my instant coffee and sat at the communal table again to drink it. I can even leave whatever's left of my coffee in the kitchen as a donation, to free up a bit of space in my bag!

As I was drinking my coffee, I got talking with a couple from Holland who was checking out and soon headed to Okinawa, and also a Japanese man who has lived in the neighbourhood for many years and had stopped by for a coffee. He was so earnest in talking to us in English, even if he wasn't fluent and we sometimes had challenges understanding each other! He wanted to know about where we were all from, what we were doing in Japan, what we had tried, etc. He offered to show me around Shinsekai, and I had to find a polite way to decline because I was really looking forward to my plans alone today. It was very kind of him though! By the time I extracted myself from conversation, got dressed, and did my makeup it was around 11:30. My first stop was breakfast, or by now, brunch!

Early on in my Japan planning (Japlanning, if you will), I learned that Osaka is known for being a huge foodie city. I initially tried to look into doing a food tour, but this was very challenging for vegetarian. There was one well-known company that said they had vegetarian options at some stops, but when I reached out to them, they weren't able to give me any examples of what the food might be (but the website had examples of the regular, omnivore food). However, in my searching, I found a blog with a recommended self-guided vegetarian food itinerary. I don't intend to do this full itinerary as I want to spend my days here otherwise, but I did check the locations mentioned for inspiration and potential options! One of the places they had looked like a really great breakfast, so I headed there first. This was Salon de Mon Cher, a 20min transit from my hostel, and I was aiming for the fancy sandwich + cake roll + coffee set. The atmosphere of this cafe was immaculate. They had a storefront selling individual cakes and sweets, or boxed sets, and then the restaurant portion was in the back. They were playing classical orchestral music (baroque or something, I don't know my genres), there were pretty chandeliers, lots of mirrors, nicely upholstered chairs, the whole nine yards. The menu had an extensive tea list, and you could even get a full afternoon tea service. However, the blog had recommended the cake + sandwich set, and I hadn't actually had breakfast yet, so that's what I got!

There were only a few other people there so it was nice and quiet. The egg sandwich was so delicious - the egg itself was thick and more like an omelette than an egg salad, and there was strong mustard either in the egg or the mayonnaise, which added a nice flavour. The bread was soft without being sweet, as a lot of bread here is. Absolutely the highest quality egg sandwich I've had here! The cake roll was so pillowy soft and the whipped cream so rich while still being light. The little rose-shaped thing on the plate was some sort of fruit flavoured cake as well, and the fresh berries were a nice addition to the cake. I felt like I was larping as a rich person eating this, but in truth the set cost like, $15. Very good. Thank you food blog post for this recommendation.

After my fancy brunch (such a vibe shift from the laid back artsy hostel), I headed to Orange Street nearby, known for its fashion shopping. I wasn't sure if I was exactly looking for anything, but it was roughly on the way to the subway station I was aiming for, so thought it would be cool to see! As it turns out, one of the first shops I saw was a 2nd Street, a thrift chain Curran had told me about. Seeing as it's likely impossible for me to get Japanese-made clothes, thrifting here is the only option, so I went in to see if there was anything I liked. I tried on a few things, including a denim dress that I swore I was just trying for the heck of it because it was a bit bulky and might be challenging to pack up in my limited space. Well. Joke's on me. It was super cute, fit perfectly, and was like $14. Soooo that's gonna be a problem for March 2nd Rosemary!

My next destination was Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan, a short train ride away from Orange Street. I had read that this is one of the best aquariums in Asia, and a very large one at that. I conveniently stored my shopping bag and coat in a coin locker, got a ticket, and had just over an hour to kill until my entry time, so I stopped in a nearby cafe for an iced coffee and drafted up my post from the day before! It was a good use of my time. Soon enough it was aquarium hours!!

I took a truly overwhelming number of photos, so I put a bunch in a separate post. I took a ton of videos too but since Tumblr hates videos, those will stay unposted. I gotta get my video editing skills together and do a supercut to some frutiger aero music or something. We'll see if that ends up happening.

Immediately upon entering the aquarium I found a stamp station (the beginning of many! It was a whole stamp rally! Now I understand the museum stamp rally in Animal Crossing...)! Even just the first tunnel into the exhibit area was amazing, with fish and rays surrounding us on all sides. Based on how long I stayed in just that tunnel I knew I was in for a full day at the aquarium.

The path took you through exhibits of different parts of the Ring of Fire: the Pacific Ocean, Japanese forests, Aleutian Islands, Monterey Bay, Gulf of Panama, Ecuador rainforest, Antarctica, Tasman Sea, Great Barrier Reef, Seto Inland Sea, Coast of Chile, Cook Strait, Japan deep sea, Arctic, Falklan Islands, a jellyfish exhibit, an exhibit on corals and the aquarium's construction of their reef exhibit (the aquarium website is actually fantastic and explains a bit about each exhibit!). Like, a bonkers amount of tanks and fish and other creatures. The design of the path through the aquarium was great! You took an escalator up and then spiralled your way gradually downwards through the different exhibits, huge tall tanks, and you could see the fish and mammals that liked to hang out at different depths. And you didn't just follow one exhibit down, because of the layout as you descended by layers you still mixed around through the Pacific, the Great Barrier Reef, etc., keeping you constantly excited (with stamp stations along the way). The Pacific tank is their largest, 9 metres tall (deep?) (5,400 cubic metres of water) with two whale sharks, huge rays and skates, hammerheads, dogfish sharks, blacktip sharks, a bunch of other sharks, a mola mola, and many, many fish ranging in size. The aquarium is known for the whale sharks, but honestly watching the rays was just as incredible and entertaining to me. They really liked coming right up to the glass and bonking into it!

The aquarium had different music playing quietly in different sections, just melodies with no lyrics, kind of indescribable in genre other than "kind of music you'd expect to hear in an aquarium." Somehow, it all suited the different sections very well. I learned when researching the aquarium more for this post that it actually changes based on time of day (hello again Animal Crossing) and is all from an album called "Acoustic Cafe Underwater Walk - Sky Dreamer" by a band eponymously called Acoustic Cafe. Feel free to listen to that as your soundtrack while reading along and looking at the photos, to truly transport you to the vibes I experienced. It's hard to really convey how much fun I was having at the aquarium. The joy of going by myself meant that I could stay for as long as I wanted at each section, sometimes squatting down just captivated by all of the creatures swimming by. I really, really enjoyed watching the white-sided dolphins zip around! They were so energetic! I have never seen a dolphin before, and while there were lots of things at the aquarium I had never seen before, there was something so charming about the dolphins being so excited and playful. They had some toys they were playing with too, I couldn't see any treats, so I think they were just playing for the sake of play! This was one of the tanks that you kept coming back to as you swirled around the building, for which I was grateful. They also had a handful of sea lions that were doing tricks for their caretakers as I was passing along, an extremely cute display to watch for a while. Things like opening their mouths on command, waving, scrunching their heads down and back up, slapping their sides, all sorts of tricks!

It was also cute to watch the penguins walking around and huddling together. There was multiple kinds of penguins from the different regions of the world, some of them more active than others. I didn't do a great job at reading what every animal was, some of the signage was in English but not all of it! You could scan QR codes or go on their website for guides in different languages, but tbh, to me that sometimes takes away from the experience of just looking at everything. Even at aquariums in Canada I don't tend to read everything! However, I can say, a number of the fish I recognized from catching them in Animal Crossing. It is 100% an educational game.

I could have spent the entire afternoon just watching the big Pacific tank with all the sharks. It was really interesting seeing some of them swim at a leisurely, gentle pace, whereas others were just zipping around. There were a few benches set up at the various depth levels but it was busy enough with all the people in front of the tanks that even so I don’t think I’d be able to see very much just sitting down. Hence why I sometimes just crouched right in front of the glass! The only thing stopping me from truly spending even more hours there was the fact that I had been on my feet for a long time, so my knees and back were getting a bit sore, and I was also getting hungry. Partway through the aquarium there was a cafe (called the Ring of Fire Cafe), and I absolutely could not resist stopping in for one of their themed treats. Believe it or not, I had not had any soft serve yet since coming to Japan, even though it’s all over the place. So, I got their whale shark soft serve. It was Ramune flavour, which is a citrus soft drink, and it was almost startlingly sour! At the cafe you could look out over the port, and even though it was gray outside and starting to get a bit darker, it was still cool seeing the boats on the water.

Reading about how the aquarium's expedition team conducted their work in Antarctica was really interesting, they went into detail about how they got there, how long it took, what they needed to wear, what kinds of research they did and the samples (read: critters) they took, how those were temperature controlled and transported back to Japan... I think it said they took over 200 samples, and all of them made the journey successfully! As we descended an escalator to one section, the room below was fairly dark, with hundreds of small, pale round lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling. I could see four kanji on the wall at the bottom of the escalator, one of which I recognized as the kanji for moon, and when I realized I gasped! We were about to see some jellyfish! Indeed, I was correct.

I did have the thought that the tanks they were in were kind of small... but also... who knows what jellyfish think about or how they feel... they don't have brains... Always so weird to think about.

I ended up staying at the aquarium for fully 3 hours. I made sure to take a bunch of photos and videos particularly for my sea creature loving friends. Shoutout to Tasha and Rachel for making me more excited to experience all these lil guys for their sakes! I browsed the gift shop and picked up a couple little things, particularly for my nieces, given how much my older niece loves the Vancouver aquarium! I hope she will be tickled pink to receive something from an aquarium across the world. For my baby niece, well, it's a story I can tell her when she's older. I reluctantly admitted it was time to leave and get some dinner, by this point nearing 6pm. Until next time, Kaiyukan! It had started raining while I was in the aquarium so I hurried to the coin locker to retrieve my coat and umbrella without getting too wet.

My dinner destination was around the halfway point in the transit between the aquarium and my hotel, a place Matthew actually found for me: a vegetarian and vegan okonomiyaki place!! The dish is particularly popular in the Kansai region. It's a savoury pancake made with batter and cabbage, filled with your choice of ingredients and cooked on a griddle. I was determined to have it in Osaka and had browsed a few restaurants that assured they had vegetarian versions, but this restaurant Matthew sent me was dedicated to veg/vegan/gluten free options. The English name was OKO Fun Okonomiyaki Bar, and it was located just at the edge of the Dotombori neighbourhood. And they're not kidding! It was super fun! As soon as you walk in you are bombarded with extremely eclectic and artsy decor, with writing and drawings all over the walls, in super bright colours. This restaurant was truly made for me. (I put more photos of all the signs around the place in another post, separate from the aquarium one!)

Even though they just opened at 6 and I got there around 6:30, it was pretty busy already. There was a considerable wait, but totally understandable, since the entire affair is run by just the owner, Shiho! Despite being crazy busy immediately, she was so cheerful and excited. She took 4-5 orders at a time and then cooked it all up, calling out numbers to the crowd of eager customers. There was so much to look at and the tunes she was playing were absolutely bumping, so I definitely wasn't bored while waiting (just a little sore in the knees). She made the ordering process super easy by posting menus throughout the queue, and spoke fluent English, asking if I was okay with egg and mayo after I asked for a vegetarian okonomiyaki. For add-ins I went with potato, carrot, spinach, green onions, and mushrooms (you could choose 5 at the base price), with cheese, and then a side of Japanese pickles. The restaurant also had a super unique self-serve drink station. You deposited ¥200 in a bucket (that's $1.75 CAD), squeezed a hanging rubber chicken (I guess to let Shiho know you are correctly participating in the honour system), and then grabbed a glass to make a cocktail. She had a ton of liquor bottles, like any you'd see at a North American bar, Japanese shochu (25-35% distilled liquor made from rice or barley or potatoes etc.), beer dispensers, sour syrups, tonic and soda water and other mixes like grapefruit or tomato juice, sake bottles, and other pre-made drinks. It was bonkers. And so cheap. She runs a very, very smart business. I am sorry to say that I didn't go too hard on the alcohol and didn't mix anything fun (I'm not here to get drunk), I stuck with one beer and a couple plum wine cans. HOWEVER, the plum wine was actually a jelly drink??? You shook the can a bunch before cracking it and then, yup, you're drinking jelly wine. It was so delicious and I am never going to stop thinking about it.

Seating was upstairs, surrounded by even more wonderful and unique decor, this time many signs explaining the health benefits of okara (the batter base), asking for kindness in cleaning up after yourself and understanding that it's just Shiho running the place, and heartwarming messages about loving and caring for each other. The okonomiyaki was fucking amazing too, and huge. I ended up taking about 1/3 of it back to the hostel (which I haven't eaten yet but it's there waiting for me just in case). The side of pickles provided nice crunchy and fresh bites in contrast to the fried and soft okonomiyaki. This is definitely the coolest restaurant I've been to on my trip. I put some more pics in my photo post. I would recommend this place in a heartbeat, even if you're a meat eater (I think the "meat" options she has are soy meat but came highly reviewed by people on google maps). Hell, I'd come there just to drink, at that price. Wild.

Being right near Dotonbori/Dotombori (depends on how much you care about consonant assimilation), a very famous area of Osaka, I took a stroll after dinner, helping to walk it off since I was so full. I honestly think seeing Dotombori in the rain made it even better. It's well known because one of the rivers snaking through the city is surrounded on both sides by a plethora of neon signs and very busy shops, with tour boats going up and down the canal. It's popular to pose in front of the Glico sign in the same pose as the athlete, which I didn't do having no one to take my photo, so I made my Ddeongbyeoli doll stand in for me. If you think the neon landscape is overwhelming for the senses, the street just parallel to the canal is even more so, crowded with restaurants selling all manner of cuisines and street foods, many of them with giant food signs above the entrance (none of which I got a photo of, sorry), and with staff our front shouting to entice you in.

I didn't get any food there, still full, but I will probably be going back in search of a specific pudding stall (if I do, you'll hear about it later). I didn't take a ton of photos here since I was fairly overwhelmed and mostly trying not to be in the way. I didn't stay long, and soon headed back to the hostel to wash up and rest. No socializing for me tonight, just right to bed!

It was a really full day with a variety of vibes, from artsy hostel to fancy cafe to underwater adventures to quirky restaurant to neon nightscape. I feel like I saw so many sides of Osaka in just one day! And thoroughly tired myself out! In a good way, but I do have to admit, I am glad my trip is coming to a close. It's a lot to be doing as a mostly-introvert.

Because we had talked about waffles the night before, Matthew and I were determined to find waffles for breakfast this morning. Our plans for the day were light, since my bus left at 3pm. We looked up a couple breakfast places and hopped in the car to try our luck, but the first restaurant ended up being a bust. It was in a really strange building with absolutely no one around, and the signs outside said it was open... But when we walked in, a sign at the internal door said closed... It slid open anyway and we popped our head in because there were a few people inside, but no staff at the door? Or anywhere, apparently? So we stood around for a minute or so and decided to just give up because the vibes were so off. Oh well. Off we went to a different place, this time a cafe/restaurant in a hotel in Takayama that Matthew had been to before for a staff event, called Green Hotel.

The vibes here were much more welcoming! The staff were nice and assured us we could eat there even though we weren't staying in the hotel. They sat us in a lounge area with low tables and comfortable armchairs all in outdated colours with floral carpets and wood decor, but it was outdated in a way that positively reminded me of my nana and granddad's house. Like, a small step away from mid century modern (if only the wood was a bit darker). We were right by the window and could look out into a Japanese style garden in the courtyard, with pines and a pond with some koi swimming around. The sky was starting to clear too, the beginnings of a great day!

The waffles really hit the spot, and the coffee was delicious. Small portion, but it was kind of a fancy place, so maybe that's to be expected. In any case it was a way better experience than the weird first restaurant we went to! We even walked around the souvenir shop attached to the hotel, it was very extensive. A lot of just same old junk, but some cute things too, so I picked up a few sarubobo things for some people.

After that, we bopped around doing some shopping. I wanted to hit up Muji in search of pen ink refills for a multicolour pen I've had for years but you can't get the refills for anymore, at least in Canada. I was wondering if I would be more successful in Japan. The answer was no, but I did get another new pen, some skincare (! I don't do skincare, this is new for me), and a few makeup items. It's hard to enter Muji without spending money... I looked at some of the clothes there too but thankfully the size of my suitcase is restricting me from going ham on clothes shopping. There was a thrift store around the corner, a chain called Santanosoko Okamototen, and indeed their logo is Santa. I had seen him around other cities but didn't know that's what the store was! We went in and I was determined to search for old kpop albums in the music section. Success!! Finally!! They weren't organized by kpop and not, so I had to spend time searching and digging through some boxes, but it was totally worth it. I got an Epik High album from 2014 (Shoebox), an EXO-CBX album (subgroup of exo with Chen, Baekhyun, and Xiumin) from 2018 (Magic, and Chen version, my favourite from exo-cbx!), and two SHINee albums - not as old as I'd like, but a single album from 2018 (Sunny Side, 3 Japanese songs), and one from 2021 (Don't Call Me, Key version). They were all just jewel case versions, so photobooks but no photocards or posters or anything special. But all 4 cds together cost me $8!!! Are you kidding me!!! And they're pretty small to pack :D it was a great haul! We finished up at a bookstore in the shopping complex too, where I looked for Fruits Basket, my favourite manga, just in case. It's been out of print for so many years but I thought maybe it had had a reprint when the anime got reanimated in 2020. No luck. I should have checked the thrift store, I guess. I did however get another pen from the stationary section of the bookstore. They had a music shop within the bookstore and I really considered getting an otomatone (if you don't know what that is, please check this, they're very hard to describe). They're pretty large though, so I decided if I have space in my bags by the end of my time in Osaka I could consider one.

Shopping spree over, it was time for lunch. We went for curry sets at a Nepalese place (always a safe bet for vegetarian food). I wanted to try their momos (dumplings) but wanted a curry set more, so got salad and garlic naan and mixed vegetable curry with an iced chai.

The restaurant inexplicably had Christmas decorations still up (it's nearly March?) which we had a laugh about.

Before long, it was time for Matthew to drop me off at the bus station. I was headed first from Takayama to Nagoya, and then getting a connecting train from Nagoya to Osaka. I was a bit antsy about the connection, I had given myself 30 minutes but I had to go to a machine in Nagoya to receive my ticket that I had reserved online, and knowing how poorly me and machines have gotten along this trip... I was a little concerned, what with navigating the station too. So, when I got on the bus I switched my train reservation to be half an hour later, to give me a full hour for my connection. Well. So I thought.

Our bus got stuck in some absolutely brutal traffic just outside of Nagoya. I thought at first that it was my foolish decision to book a bus that was supposed to get in at 5:30 on a weekday, prime rush hour. But actually the delays were because of at least 2 car accidents, if not more (probably in addition to regular rush hour delays). It took us more than 1 hour to crawl forward through what should have been less than 10 minutes of driving. After all that angsting about my connection, I simply wasn't going to make it at all! I wasn't that stressed about it, because it's not like I could do anything, I was stuck on a bus with no other options. I made peace with it. However I wished I had a snack. When I was on the bus I was checking on the train website about what my options were, and found out that even though I missed my train I could take a later train on the same route at no additional cost, I just wasn't guaranteed the seat. The trains have a non-reserved section where it's first come first serve (cheaper, but I don't really want to risk having to stand, hence why I went for the reserved tickets on all my trains). By the time we got to the bus station in Nagoya, it was 7:15, fully 1hr45mins later than intended. Rip.

Once I got to the station I waited in the ticket line to verify with a staff that indeed I could get on a train no problem. I also didn't want to try and use a machine to receive my ticket in case there were issues since it was past my departure time. The staff assured me that I was good to sit in the non-reserved cars, and away I went to get a much needed snack (onigiri, of course, and a warm tea). By the time I got on my train, it was nearly 7:45, almost 2 hours later than intended! Thankfully the ride to Osaka was less than an hour, and I was on the highest speed train. I checked my hostel booking for check-in information, and realized their latest check in time was 8pm! Ahh! The site said to message them if we were arriving later than that, and I sent a panicked message at 7:45, apologizing profusely and asking for any instructions. As I was waiting for a reply I was frantically checking Booking.com for any last minute options in the area just in case, and found some cheap capsule hotels, so I had a back up plan. Thankfully, the hostel messaged me back with detailed self-check in instructions, just before 8. Phew! This day was a fucking rollercoaster.

The train from Shin-Osaka station to my hostel took less than half an hour, and I stopped at a FamilyMart after I got out of the subway for a couple beers and snacks, since I knew I would not be willing to go to a restaurant after arriving. I ended up arriving to the hostel just before 9. I had no idea when I booked it but it's located in an arcade (the covered shopping street kind, not the games kind), and on the short the walk from the subway station to the hostel I was surrounded by little karaoke bars with middle aged men drunkenly belting out their tunes, and restaurants selling varieties of fried foods. I was single mindedly determined to get to Cocoroom. The instructions were very clear, and I made it in no problem.

As it turns out, there was still an employee working there (he explained that he stays there, when I asked). He told me how to use the keycard and directed me towards my room, on the 3rd floor. I booked a private room because I'm too sleep-sensitive to share dorms in hostels, but wanted a cool (and cheap) vibe to end my trip on. I should have taken a picture of my room before I exploded my stuff all over it, but it's nice and simple and a perfect size for my home base for a few days. I was so relieved to have finally made it!!

The hotel is run (or was started by? unsure) Kawasaki University of Arts, and the place has an incredible vibe. There's artwork scattered absolutely everywhere, in all the hallways and rooms, and the first floor lounge area is so cool. I haven't taken photos because it's always full of people and that seems inconsiderate, but it's really interesting. I set my stuff down, changed out of my sweaty shirt, and headed back downstairs to drink my much-needed and well-earned beers while I caught up on my Takayama blog posts, since eating and drinking in the rooms isn't permitted.

The lounge area has a big rectangular communal table with tatami mats around it, and a bunch of pillows to sit on, with the part under the table open to put your legs under. The employee was still there, and I realized in my hectic state I hadn't introduced myself, and learned his name was David. He was also sitting doing something on his laptop, and it was a comfortable silence as I was writing. At some point, another guest came back, and started picking away at a guitar in the lounge, out of sight from me. It was a really lovely vibe, this unseen musician offering soft and exploratory tunes, they were truly just having fun and playing for the sake of playing, dancing through various melodies with no familiar songs (to me at least), just quiet gentle sounds. After a bit, the player came around the corner and I chatted with him a bit about music, but never actually got his name. By the sounds of his accent I think he might be from Germany or Belgium, unsure. After a bit David joined in playing music as well, picking the guitar while the nameless man moved to piano. With this soundtrack I managed to get two blog posts up in relatively quick succession (it usually takes me around an hour per post, maybe 1.5 if it was a full day). I wrapped up and headed back upstairs to finally go to bed, around 11:30. I caught up on my chats after getting to bed so didn't sleep until a bit after midnight, being on this time difference from my friends in EST and PST is really hard!! I'm glad it's only temporary.

Today was my one and only full day in Takayama with Matthew, so we made the most of it, even though I slept in a bit!

After a somewhat lazy start of breakfast at home and getting ready (I totally didn't take any outfit pics of my Takayama days, oops), Matthew had found that we could go and craft our own sarubobo at the Takayama Craft Experience Center! What a wonderful idea! So we drove back into the city, appreciating the chill rainy/foggy day after the weather last night. It was really so beautiful seeing the clouds around the mountains (the pictures below are on the brief walk from Matthew's to the bus, in Ichinomiya). We took a bus in today because we had planned to drink later!

At the crafting place, they gave us the instructions in Japanese and I interpreted based on gestures and what Matthew translated to me. The dolls themselves were already made, and we got to choose which colour of doll, the colour of the little emblem around their neck, and the pattern of their little outfit. Then we could choose what to write on the emblem (I really don't know what it's called). The center had some example kanji on sheets for reference, including some things like "love," "prosperity," "success," as well as kanji for different countries. I decided to try my hand at the kanji for "friend," given the reason I was in Takayama, and because it was a relatively simple kanji. There were a bunch of pens and markers to choose from to design it how we wanted! I had picked a red sarubobo because it felt the most classic, and hemmed and hawed for a while at the other colour choices, but I like what I went with in the end :) As it turns out I guess I forgot to get a close up of my finished sarubobo, but they wrapped it up so nicely to protect it, so I'll have to wait until I'm home. But, one of the staff at the center took a cute picture of Matthew and I with our finished sarubobo!

It was a really fun experience and I'm so glad I have a customized one as a souvenir instead of one of the generic ones from the shops in old town, or elsewhere around Takayama. I will always think of this experience when I look at my little guy in the future!

For lunch, we headed to a Thai place Matthew had been to before, usually a safe bet for vegetarian food. Indeed, I got a massive plate of pad thai, which I haven't had in a few months! I should really get back into making it, I used to cook it pretty frequently around 2019-2020, including when I lived with my sister and my brother-in-law. I don't think I've made it since then though, so I'm happy to get it at restaurants!

After lunch we continued to bop around old town a bit. We had passed a stationary store the day before but not gone in (it was closed) and I absolutely cannot resist any stationary store, so we popped in and I ended up getting a few pens (including a Hangyodon pen, he's a Sanrio character that I've really come to love while playing the Hello Kitty Island Adventure game on switch. He's a very cute dragon and in that game his whole schtick is that he makes really bad puns, so of course I love him.

We also went to a shop(?) in the area that was set up as a little play shooting range - for ~$10 you could get 15 shots from a cork rifle and attempt to get prizes. Super gimmicky, but we were there to do what Takayama had to offer!! The prizes were, as far as I could tell, all different kinds of candies. Both of us managed to get a few! It ended up being actually really fun! I got orange gumballs and some Sumikko Gurashi candies I haven't tried yet.

Matthew wanted to take me to the sweets shop his friend runs, to try dorayaki, popular in the area (but not just in Gifu, it's made elsewhere too). It's a treat made of two pancakes with red bean paste inside, sometimes with other ingredients mixed in. Matthew's friend was so so lovely! We talked in a combination of Japanese with me understanding only a few words, Matthew translating when needed, and her speaking some English as well. We shared four dorayaki - regular (just red bean paste), ginger, cream cheese and nuts, and plum (I love anything plum). She also had this absolutely gorgeous yokan, a wagashi made also from red bean paste into a jelly-like texture (but that doesn't suffice to describe it), and she had made hers in two layers with chocolate as well. We got some matcha to accompany the sweets, and sat down in her shop to eat them, chatting some more. Everything was super delicious! At one point, another group of three came in, a Japanese man, one person from Mexico, and one person from Finland. The Japanese fellow spoke Spanish, and the Mexican fellow spoke Japanese, and they also sat down and we were talking in a combination of Japanese, English, with some Spanish thrown in for good measure. It was a really delightful and spontaneous multilingual experience, once again making me really appreciate getting to come on this trip and meet people from around the world and share delightful and unexpected conversation. The shop owner took a photo of all of us to put on her instagram story, it was very sweet!

Matthew mentioned that our next stop was sake tasting, and the shop owner was trying to explain some differences between some kinds of sake. She had a bottle in the back that she wanted us to try, so actually ended up giving us some on the house! I don't think she even sells it at the shop, but she was insistent, so we got started early. It was really nice of her! And it was tasty sake too. I don't know anything about sake, but it's easy enough to know what I like and don't like. So kind!

We navigated to the sake tasting place that Matthew had been recommended by a friend. He explained that the way it worked was you got tokens, and then exchanged the tokens for whatever kind of sake you wanted to try from the multitude they had there. Heck yeah, I'm in. Drinking a bunch of sake at ~2pm? Why not! Once we got there, we exchanged money for tokens, and our first task was to spin a gachapon (capsule machine) for a sake cup. There were I think 6 different designs you could get? This was then what you used for the tasting! It worked out to ~$1 per sake sample, with some of them costing a bit more. There had to have been at least 25 different ones to choose from, possibly more. They had an info card with some features of the sake listed on them, and the dispensers had tasting notes, but some of them we ended up getting just for the labels or the colour of the bottles. You inserted a token into whichever dispenser you wanted, put your sake cup under the spout, and pressed a button to give out the exact right amount. I've never seen anything like it!

It was a little bit cramped since it was a popular place and the actual space with all the dispensers was a bit small, but that was part of the charm. We ended up interacting with a woman there from China who we helped figure out how to get the cup and use the dispensers, and crossed paths with her a few times, asking her which ones she liked and recommending ones we had tried, and asking a bit about where she was from and why she was in the area. Again, another really sweet and brief interaction with a stranger!

Some of the sake we tried was (in my opinion) kind of bad (just strong and a bit sour but not in a good way), and some of it was fucking delicious (they had a yuzu one, and a mikan (kind of like clementine) one, and some of the regular ones were quite smooth). It was all part of the experience having the bad ones, though. We sometimes chose the same and sometimes different, but always tried each other's. I think we probably ended up having about 8-10 different kinds each? Little cups full, of course, but having that many in quick succession was kind of taking its toll and we were getting pretty silly. Towards the end, Matthew and I were finishing with the tastiest one (mikan) that you had to get dispensed from the counter not a machine. He asked after an employee his friend knew there, Shuhei (sp?) who he ended up chatting with, and asking what his favourite sake was. Shuhei said he liked cloudy sake (which in writing this I learned is called doboruku), which he gave us a sample of on the house. He explained that some sake is processed through a very fine mesh and they keep only the pure, clear alcohol, with doboruku, it is not pressed at all and the solids remain, resulting in the cloudy sake. I think he was explaining that it was a way to still use the waste product. The sample he gave us was not only cloudy, it was thick, way more than I was expecting! And a bit gritty! I can't even really liken the texture to anything. Maybe like thick hot chocolate? But it was cold. It was really interesting, I probably wouldn't have tried it unless he had offered it to us. Thank you Shuhei for the new experience!!

Running on our sake high, we headed towards the train station back to Ichinomiya. I insisted on stopping for a quick mitarashi dango on the way back since Matthew had pointed out some stalls the day before - a dango (sticky rice flour snack) cooked with a sweet soy sauce glaze. I have not really experienced street food here since it can be hard to tell sometimes what is meat and what is not. Bless having fluent friends! We went to a little stall that I couldn't even find on google maps later (so I'm glad I asked Matthew what the sign said) called Suzuran, run by an old lady. It was so tasty! Savoury, but rich? And still a little bit sweet? Very chewy, a great texture, with a smokey taste from being grilled on an open flame. I am glad I got to try it.

Snacked up, we went back home. I had laundry that needed doing, and we had to make dinner after all that alcohol! I did laundry just at Matthew's but we dried it at a laundromat and took a little drive around while we waited for it to finish. He pointed out the different schools he works at (he's an ALT, assistant language teacher, at 3 different schools). We continued just driving around, going up a mountain road for a bit, killing time. It was a peaceful drive, since Ichinomiya is fairly small and by this point in the evening there wasn't really anyone else on the road. Soon enough it was time to go retrieve the laundry and head home.

The dinner menu was kimchi jjigae (which I co-opted into soondubu (soft tofu) jjigae). Matthew didn't ask me to cook but he suggested this dish and I have cooked it so many times that I can do it on autopilot, and I love to cook for other people. Not only that, but it's the first home cooked meal I had had in 2 weeks! It gets really tiring just eating at restaurants. The first place I stayed in Tokyo had a kitchen so I could have cooked there, but at the beginning I was so excited to try restaurants. I've definitely been getting restaurant fatigue so I was very grateful for and excited to cook again. We put the rice on first and while it was going cracked into our fun drinks from Donki, and played a few rounds of Dutch Blitz (a fast paced card game) while listening to my upbeat kpop playlist. It's really great that both me and Matthew love kpop, because it made the soundtrack for my time in Takayama/Ichinomiya very easy. Dutch Blitz is definitely better with 3-4 people instead of 2 but it picked up after the first few rounds! Especially a couple drinks in!

Once the rice was done I threw together the soondubu jjigae in no time (it's a very quick and easy dish. I highly recommend putting this into your meal rotation). It's warm and slightly spicy, perfect for a rainy day. it ended up more sweet than I usually make it (just due to the red pepper paste that Matthew had), but still delicious and cozy. We ate a little cake Matthew had in his fridge for dessert, kind of waffle texture, and not too sweet. We continued working our way through the drinks we had gotten at Donki (all alcoholic sodas around 3%). We got mikan and yuzu, peach, apple (but not really cider), and strawberry cream soda flavour, and Matthew had already a Brazilian drink that was some fruit I had never heard of called guarana, and then a triple berry drink. They were varying degrees of good. The apple one was weird, the strawberry one was hella sweet, but the other ones were delicious. We also tried some of the candies from the shooting range the day before.

Our plans for the rest of the evening were simple - watch some Korean content. We decided on the show "I Live Alone," which follows various celebrities through a day (or more) in their daily life. We watched the episode with Jihyo, one of the members of Twice, since we both love her. It ended up being a weirdly edited supercut of a couple episodes, which was fine, but the clips were put together in not always the proper chronological order which made it a bit confusing. Matthew had seen the episodes before, though, and was able to explain any continuity issues to me. Finally, we rounded out the night by watching kpop meme compilations. Absolutely classic activity, which I am always happy to engage in with my similarly-minded friends. The benefit to these was that they had a good mix of groups - Matthew and I have some overlap in the groups we like, but the venn diagram is not a circle, so there was a bit of everything for both of us.

It was a perfect way to conclude the evening, and something that I would do to wind down even just by myself, so it was familiar and fun. As expected, my one full day in Takayama/Ichinomiya was indeed very full! Thanks to Matthew's wonderful suggestions of what to do! I had all sorts of experiences that I wouldn't have otherwise had. Of course, I slept very well once again. It's been a beautiful and wonderful time here!

I am once again playing catch-up after spending a wonderful 2.5 days hanging out with Matthew in Ichinomiya and Takayama!

My travel from Nagoya to Takayama on the 24th was mostly good. I realized as soon as I got to the subway station by my hotel that I had made a foolish mistake of booking my bus to Takayama for 9:15am - because this meant I was taking the subway to Nagoya Station during rush hour. Trying to get on a train at 8:30am was bonkers! Particularly because I had my suitcase with me. It's only a carry-on sized suitcase, but the trains were packed full. I let 2 pass before I even attempted getting on one, and felt like a silly bumbling foreigner having the audacity to take the train at that time with my luggage. I made it in the end, but I have learned my lesson. Once arriving at Nagoya Station I tried to follow google's instructions for which exit to take to get to the bus station...except there was construction at the station and I'm pretty sure that exit was not accessible. I have a real hard time navigating if I can't see the sky, so I resolved to just get outside and reset from there. This put me out at a location a bit of a walk from the bus station, also with some confusing construction, so I ended up having to hurriedly walk for about ten minutes, rushing since my bus was leaving soon! I tried to give myself 30mins between getting to the train station and finding my bus but it ended up actually being only about 15. Thankfully, I made it, and managed to grab a konbini breakfast to eat on the bus as well. Phew. But boy howdy did I ever get sweaty rushing around.

The bus itself was uneventful. I spent most of it drafting my previous blog post (drafting some of it twice because I thought due to the reception Tumblr had lost the draft, it ended up getting recovered though), and watching the landscape. We were headed 2hrs north of Nagoya into the mountainous Gifu prefecture, so it was very beautiful, with more snow gradually appearing as I got closer to Takayama. Soon enough (just shy of noon) I was reunited with Matthew at the Takayama bus station! I met Matthew in the first year of my PhD at UVic, he was a Master's student in applied linguistics. I had not seen him since he moved to Japan a few years ago!! So I was so grateful that he was excited to host me in his town and show me around. And even more grateful that he had a car to drive us!!

We dropped off my stuff at his apartment (in nearby Ichinomiya) and rested for a little bit, catching up on what's been going on the past few years. It was nice getting to update him on all the UVic and Grad Student Society goings on, and hear how his job out here has been going. I truly came to Takayama with basically no plans, mostly wanting to see where Matthew has been living and spend time with him. He had all sorts of great activities to suggest, and places he wanted to take me!

When we headed back into town, we first stopped at Cafe Takayama for cheesecake and drinks (coffee for me, iced tea for Matthew). It was a nice way to start the afternoon!! We had a reservation for sushi at 6, and some time to kill until them, so we walked around Takayama's Old Town. It's a popular location for tourists, known for its wooden architecture and little shops selling local food, treats, and souvenirs. Matthew showed me his favourite bridge, and explained about some statues of two yōkai, Ashinaga and Tenaga (long legs and long arms, respectively).

I also saw some trees held up with that protective technique I had learned about the other day, yukitsuri! Matthew pointed out Sarubobo, local dolls/figures/charms for protection and luck. They are usually red, but different colours are associated with different charms. The name means baby monkey (saru = monkey, bobo = baby), which I learned while writing this originated from the dolls being given to pregnant people for luck since monkeys are said to have easy births. The sarubobo were everywhere! As statues, many kinds of wood figurines in a variety of sizes, popular characters as sarubobo (like Hello Kitty), even snacks shaped like them, and many many dolls. They are extremely charming! (the characters in the image below say "Hida," a nearby city in Gifu).

We poked around some shops, and then decided to go to the Retro Museum. I had read a blog about a 2-day itinerary in Takayama and this was one of the places mentioned. When we went it happened to be a bit crowded with a large group of friends, I guess it's good that the place is popular! It did make it a bit crowded since the rooms/hallways were pretty narrow. The museum had different rooms set up with an incredibly huge collection of retro furniture, games, decor, just so many things. There was a room set up like an old classroom (I made sure to graffiti a poorly drawn Canadian flag on the chalkboard); there was an attic with a whole bunch of old board games and video games (including a great collection of old consoles), covered in movie posters and other advertisements; a few sections were dedicated to old arcade games (some of which you could play! Some for free, and others cost anywhere from 10-100 yen (~10¢-$1)); a room set up like an old diner; one like a hairdresser; one like a doctors' office; a bunch of slot machines; an old telephone booth - it was very extensive! Matthew and I ended up playing Pac-man and a space invaders-like game called Galaga (I'd never heard of it), some air hockey, and a very old crane game that did not work very well at all. It ended up being a lot more interactive of a place than I had initially assumed it would be! I didn't take a ton of photos, since there were so many people, and I didn't want to catch them without their knowing.

After the retro museum, we still had a bit of time to kill, so I had my first time experiencing the sensory overload that is Don Quijote. It's a chain store that sells absolutely everything, but also throughout the store there are so many speakers playing clashing music, jingles, voices, everything. I had heard about Donki from many friends that have visited Japan, and knew I had to go in at some point, but holy moly it was even more overwhelming than anyone could have prepared me for. We did get a handful of fun drinks to have later, and some candies, so like, profit. But at what cost. (my sanity).

After that it was on to Hamasushi, the conveyor belt sushi restaurant Matthew had made us a reservation at. Also my first time experiencing that! There was so many options for me, I wasn't expecting it! The table had a very convenient little tablet and we ordered so much food. I was so excited!! Especially after a konbini breakfast and cheesecake lunch. I had cucumber rolls, radish rolls, natto sushi (fermented soybeans), inari pockets (sweet soybean wrappers), edamame, tempura lotus root, tamago (sweet egg omelette), and tiramisu and bracken starch mochi for dessert. I ate so much I felt ill after, but it was absolutely worth it. And it was a really good price!!

Though I felt like I could barely move after all that, we stopped by a grocery store on our way back to Matthew's to get some stuff for breakfast and dinner the next day. Finally back home, I changed into my blissfully stretchy PJs, and we sat down to watch some anime. I didn't realize, but Frieren season 2 is currently airing!! So exciting!! I totally forgot. We watched the last episode of season 1 to remind me what had happened (I was really confused since I thought some plot points I had seen were in season 2, but, no), and then we watched all ?6? episodes of season 2 that were out. Man I love that show... it's so emotional, in such a good way. I was very happy to get caught up on that. I know I am missing out on a bunch of my other regularly updating shows (Dropout, my podcasts), so making a dent on some of my media piling up felt good.

I wrote this whole post on my phone on the bus to Takayama, so if you see any typos or mistakes, no you don't.

Ican't believe how quickly the conference went by! Especially because the third day was very short, just one presentation session at 10, final plenary talk at 10:45, and then closing remarks. There were 4 concurrent sessions in the 10am presentation slot and it was very hard to choose which one to attend, but I ended up going to Exploring the iconicity between music notes and syllable structure: A preliminary study by Yohei Wakioka and Seunghun Lee. I was already interested in this, but found out once I sat down in the room that the second author was the supervisor of another presenter I had met and chatted with at the conference dinner, Ren Hasegawa. It was a really cool talk, the study had asked classically trained musicians to listen to scales/arpeggios at different tempos, staccato vs legato, major or minor key, and then sing/say the sound they heard back to the experimenters without using "do re mi" etc. Then the authors analyzed which consonants and vowels were used in what conditions. For example, they found that although [a] was the predominant vowel, participants used mostly [t] or [r] (ta ta ta, ra ra ra) but it depended on if the sound was a scale or played legato (used more 'ra') or an arpeggio or played more staccato (used more 'ta'). It was really interesting! I'd be interested to know what they find for other language users (these were Japanese) or musicians trained on different instruments (none of them played brass or woodwind instruments). Cool stuff though.

Finally, the closing talk was by a linguist who is like a celebrity to me, Pamela Perniss. Hers was some of the first work I read back in my undergrad when I started researching how signed languages and gesturing are similar and different, what strategies are used, how to analyze them, all that. So her work has had a pretty big impact on my general career path, it was incredible to get to talk to her at the conference (she even attended my talk and asked me some questions!!). I managed to keep my cool and not do the whole "oh my gosh you're so cool I'm such a big fan" deal and talked to her like a Normal Person.

Anyway, her plenary was titled Harnessing iconicity for language learning. As she explained, the language learning part was a bit more implicit (we had heard from other plenaries about acquisition in more detail), and her presentation was largely about what we can find out from how iconicity is used or surfaces in both signed languages and gesture, and how that might be able to inform/imply how language is acquired/learned. She presented some really interesting work comparing iconicity strategies and how they are shared or differ between two example sign languages, German Sign Language (GDS) and British Sign Language (BSL). I have read a little bit about words/structures in different sign languages and knew some examples of how a sign language may sign e.g. CAT, such as by showing their whiskers (American SL, others), or by demonstrating rubbing the face with a paw (Japanese SL), or by mimicking petting a cat (Australian SL). I have spent a lot of time on the website Spread The Sign where you can look up words and get visual dictionary results that allow you to see the signs in many different languages. Knowing (a) sign language(s) absolutely wasn't necessary to understand Pamela's talk, but it was nice that a lot of the topics were familiar to me from my reading and time in ASL classes. Pamela also talked about an experiment they ran looking at how BSL and silent gestures by British English speakers changed during child-directed language - that is, what kinds of things changed about the speech/sign? Anyone who has talked to kids/pets knows that there's a tendency to make your pitch changes more dramatic, stretch out vowels, repeat things more, or generally be more expressive. I have not thought much about how this emphasis might look in a signed language, so it was really cool to hear about! As you might expect, they found that signers tended to make their signs larger, repeat them more times (e.g. for a sign that already has repetition in its articulation, they would do more repetitions of it), and making signs longer in duration. What was really cool was how much these strategies aligned with the kinds of Hul'q'umi'num' co-speech gestures and intonation strategies I had looked at/talked about in my presentation! Pamela and her colleagues found that signers and silent gesturers used similar strategies to accentuate their articulations, showing that there's some reason why, across languages and modalities, language users take advantage of those kinds of iconic utterances. Sure, it may seem obvious, but it's still important to demonstrate through experimentation! All in all it was a super interesting talk. I got the chance to ask her some of my questions after we broke off to lunch which was nice.

After that, the organizers wrapped up the conference with some concluding remarks, including Ian Joo making an announcement that IcoSem (one of the 2 conferences that had joined for this one) is going to be in Daejeon, South Korea next year (his hometown!) 👀 might be nice if I could pull together more research so that I can go to Korea... Something to think about!

We had a brief lunch break before the conference excursion to Ghibli Park, which only some of us were going on (I think it was about 15 of us total?). I used this lunch break mostly to exchange contact information with some of the people I had met, and say our farewells and good wishes and express excitement for seeing each others' future work! It's always so weird to have to say goodbye to people I only met a few days ago but already feel close to or like I have learned so much about them. I love coming together in spaces like this!

Around 1pm, the group of us going on the excursion gathered to take the train out together. It was around 1hr transit to the park, and I was very grateful to just turn my brain off and follow the leaders. It was two of the four conference organizers taking us, Ian Joo and Hinano Iida. I continued chatting with folks throughout the journey, meeting some people I hadn't talked to yet at the conference (Xiaoben Yuan, Thomas Van Huey, Simon David Stein, Juliana Neves-Müller, and Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia were who I hung out with the most during the afternoon, along with Ian and Pamela!). It was so awesome getting to talk with people from all over the world, each of us from a different country, some of us with shared languages other than English. Getting linguists & language researchers together is so fun because there's SO much code switching which you may or may not be able to follow, based on what languages/language families you're familiar with.. but also so much sharing of "in my language/my country" and discussion about how things are expressed in the various languages we represent (either our native languages, or the languages we research). Every time I hang out like this I want to learn more languages!! I do think this is the most multilingual/international conference I've gone to, everyone was from all over.

Once we got to Ghibli Park, some of the group broke off into smaller groups and it was a bit of a free-for-all. We only had a few hours until the park closed (what with coming after the conference wrapped up), and it was a public holiday (the Emperor's birthday) so the park was pretty busy. As a result, we didn't have time to wait in the lines into e.g. the bakery from Kiki's Delivery Service, to go into Howl's Moving Castle or the hat shop that Sophie worked at, or other things like that. It was mostly just walking around looking at the park! The weather was spectacular, clear skies and sunny, which most of us had not prepared for.. I was really wishing for my sunglasses or a hat. But I'm glad I wasn't wearing a sweater! I did have to carry my coat the whole time but that's okay.

We started in the Valley of the Witches, since we had a timed entry for Ghibli's Warehouse but were a bit early for that still. It was cool to see all the recreations from the different movies! And of the group that was there, we had a good distribution of people who had seen only one or two Ghibli movies, those who had seen a handful (myself included, I've probably seen like 10?), and those that had seen almost all of them. Also a good spread of which movies each of us had seen, so it was fun getting to explain to each other all the visual references. Ian had definitely seen the most, I was glad he could help us all understand! He was also very encouraging of us taking group photos together which was really cute. I'm not sure if he'll put them on a website or email us or what, but I hope I get to see them somehow! He took a lot throughout the whole conference too.

After the Valley of the Witches, we headed to Ghibli's Warehouse, a big indoor section with all sorts of scenes from different movies set up, some exhibitions showing sketches/storyboards from the movie, a whole section on food in Ghibli movies, even a little 15-min movie about Mei (from My Neighbor Totoro) interacting with cat bus and other cat... vehicles...on a little adventure. It was cute, if a bit strange, the way catbus is. We continued to walk around and take it all in, some of us stopping at different points for photos with the setup. I was happy Luis got one of me with Totoro!! I wish I could have hugged the big fuzzy figure. I also really liked the section they had set up from The Secret World of Arietty, because it's about miniature people living with real-sized objects that they make use of, so it was like everything around us was giant. Extremely charming!!

It took us a while to work our way through the Warehouse! Unfortunately, that meant we didn't have time to go to Mononoke Forest, one of the other outdoor parts of the park. I was pretty excited about that part because I really love that movie, so it's a bit of a shame... I could have had time to go if I had split off from the group from the get go to run around myself, but honestly, I'm glad I stayed with other people even if it meant seeing less. It was really fun to experience everything together! As I was saying to some of the folks at dinner later, I love traveling by myself, but I do sometimes miss getting to do things together and talk about what you're seeing/doing. Even though these people were all very new friends to me, it was still really fun and exciting to hang out all afternoon, talk and learn and laugh together. I'll just have to come back to the park another time, for a full day!

The park closed at 5, so soon enough it was time for us to head back. We all had to go the same way at first (only one way out of there) and then even once we were getting back into the city a lot of us were on the same train line. A couple people peeled off at different times and we said our goodbyes on the train, including Ian and Hina who were headed off to a well-earned celebratory dinner with the other conference organizers. Hina was saying how tired she was after working so hard, I can't blame her! It's so much effort organizing a conference! At least she was saying she had the next day off.

The rest of us on the train made tentative dinner plans together, planning on getting off at Sakae station and finding a restaurant. As we got off there, Pamela also headed off from the group, and I gave her a hug goodbye which was !!! very sweet. It means so much to me that I could meet her and hang out with her and talk shop but also just talk! I hope I see her again at more conferences.

There were 7 of us left by this point, and we had gotten a recommendation for an izakaya (small plates) chain, Sekai no Yamachan. I looked at the menu and ascertained that there would be enough vegetarian stuff for me to eat! It was a super fun vibe, some of the group spoke Japanese which helped us somewhat (thanks Ben!) but even still the restaurant was pretty foreigner friendly. It was great to be able to try a bunch of different dishes, I think I ended up getting 5 dishes plus dessert, and a couple drinks (a beer and a plum wine).

There was cold tofu, steamed(?) greens, garlic fried rice (oops, had meat but I picked around it), a very interesting egg and cheese omelette thing served with rice crackers (the sauce they put on it was so sweet? Like syrup??) and fried burdock root & garlic stems. The other people got interesting stuff like fried squid beaks, pork intestine, sashimi, wings, even horse meat! It was a huge menu. For dessert I got honey-glazed sweet potato and vanilla ice cream.

It's not necessarily that I was surprised I got along with everyone so well, but there was something delightful about sharing a meal and drinks with these very new people. I had so much fun! It was way nicer than just going back to my hotel by myself and finding some random restaurant for a quick and lonely dinner. I wasn't even that tired and out-socialized; it was great to hang out and fill my human interaction bar again after a quiet and solitary time in Kyoto. We all exchanged contact information and social media as the night wore down, with some folks headed to a bar after (a macho bar!) but most of us splitting up and going back to our hotels. All of us gave each other a round of hugs when parting, which was very sweet. I definitely went back to my hotel feeling very emotionally fulfilled, after a wonderful day and a wonderful conference in general. I love getting together with a bunch of other kind, genuine, nerdy people! I am so, so glad that I applied for this conference, got in, and was lucky enough to be able to make a whole trip of it.

Conference first day

As expected I'm delayed in posting my conference blog!! I stayed up till like midnight the night before the conference perfecting my slides and making sure my clothes were nicely ironed after once again getting crammed into my suitcase. Then I was up at 6:30 to do one run-through of my presentation before heading to Nagoya University to make sure my timing was good. Well... so I thought. I forgot to actually start a timer. After I finished, I didn't have time to do it again and actually figure out how long it took, so off I went hoping for the best. It's a good thing I've done so many conferences by now that I have fully internalized how long 20 minutes is - when I actually gave my presentation, I came in perfectly on time. It's a nice reminder that, yeah, I do know what I'm doing! Here was my fit for day 1 (I immediately got compliments on my little bunny plushie):

Anyway, it was a very easy transit to the university, only 2 stops away on the subway. I got only a little bit turned around when I got to campus, because I had written the wrong building, but quickly found my way to the venue. I was a little apprehensive because I know no one at this conference, so I didn't want to show up too early. I got there around 15mins before the opening remarks started and awkwardly settled in, saying nothing to anyone. I knew I would have to put my extrovert had on soon, so took that little bit of time in the morning to just look and listen. It seems a lot of the other presenters and organizers knew each other, some had even brought gifts from their home country for the organizers! It was very sweet!

During the opening remarks I got to learn a bit about the history of this conference. It's called IcoLL2026, and is actually the joining of two separate conferences: The 4th Iconicity Seminar and the 15th International Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature. I had never heard of either of these before. I have done a lot of conferences in the Indigenous Languages field, particularly of North America, and then other North American conferences like on syntax and more general conferences like the Canadian Linguistic Association annual conference. This was my first time coming to something specifically about iconicity, and a conference which drew a lot of researchers working on gesture and signed languages. Broadly speaking, iconicity is when form resembles meaning - for example, onomatopoeia like boom, meow; gestures that are miming an action like knitting or showing people walking using your hands in an upside-down v; some signs like ASL for tree or banana; talking about a small animal in high-pitched voice and large animal in low-pitched voice; etc. So, because I research primarily iconic gestures (where you can transparently understand what the gesture is representing), this is why I applied. Any misrepresentations of authors' research in my post is obviously my own! I'm going from memory and shoddy notes!

The conference opened with some comments from the organizers, and broad observations and questions about iconicity (entitled Disentangling iconicity by Hinano Iida). For just a taste of the kinds of things I heard about at this conference so far... How does the mapping between form and meaning differ across modalities? What are some theoretical, experimental, cross-linguistic comparisons? How can we separate iconicity from transparency, when they are often conflated? How can we investigate the relationships between iconicity and sound symbolism (e.g. the famous bouba and kiki experiment: one of these shapes is bouba, one is kiki. Which is which?)

I have known these terms of iconicity, sound symbolism, form/meaning for a long time but never really delved into the theory or history, or engaged really very deeply beyond "this gesture is iconic." So my goal for this conference was to learn a lot from other people. There were presentations lined up on literature, art, comics, music, so all sorts of things I have not heard about before at conferences!

Immediately following was the opening plenary titled A structural perspective on relational similarity in iconicity (by Noburo Saji), where Noburo asked how can we empirically investigate the process of relational similarity mapping to/corresponding to iconicity, and he conducted a case study regarding whether sound-meaning correspondences can be detected from structural similarities. So, if speakers are shown a bunch of different random shapes (like above) and rate them in terms of their similarities to each other, you can end up with a relational map across different features like "roundness/spikiness" and "simple/complex." Speakers can also be asked to rate the similarities of different sound pairings, like "ba" to "ka" or "ni" to "me," which can also be represented as a relational map. Then, how do those two maps (shapes and sounds) compose with each other? Noburo found that when composing these relational maps on top of each other, the /a/ vowel sounds aligned with groupings of shapes that were more complex, jagged, and wide; whereas the /u/ vowel sounds aligned with shapes that were more simple, smooth, and narrow. It was really interesting to hear about this method which I had absolutely no idea about! I generally tried to ask questions at every talk I went to, or if I had no time, go to authors afterwards/during the coffee breaks. Or at least record questions in my notebook to prompt myself to keep thinking about things. So, even by the first coffee break, I had people to talk to. Also the general atmosphere at the conference was super friendly, and it was easy to just walk into conversations and ask the classic "where are you based, what do you work on"!

I had to make some decisions about the talks I attended throughout the day since there were so many different sessions. I'll keep the notes to just that hint of those two talks above, so that this doesn't turn into a book report (also because then it will feel like work to me! I want this to feel like a blog to me!)

Do visual signals really afford more iconicity than acoustic signals? by Qingfeng Tong and Marcus Perlman (I got talking with Qingfeng later in the day and the next day, he was really interested in my work too! And asked how to find me/my work, to which I had to admit I don't have a website and don't talk about my work on social media and don't have many publications... talk about motivation to actually finally make a website!!)

Automatic identification of phonetic and semantic patterns for iconicity research: A transformer approach by Tom Parker and Jared Allen (a lot of this was over my head, but Tom explained it so nicely to me when I had more questions later!)

The iconicity of "shadow" from In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki Junichiro) to Murakami Haruki's novels as the key to explore the modern Japanese psyche, aesthetic, and identity by Bich Nha Truc Nguyen and Tooru Inuoe

Multimodal iconicity - ideophones and co-speech gestures in Ga and German by Josiah Nii Ashie Neequaye, Josephine Kim Kaul, Markus Steinbach, and Cornelia Ebert (I spent some time throughout the conference talking with Josiah!)

And then my talk closed out the day (in one of the concurrent sessions), Going above and beyond: Iconic pitch and gesture extension in Hul’q’umi’num’.

There was also a poster session in which I did not get to talk to everyone/look at all the posters but I spent some time around:

Are turn off the music and turn the music off two different signs? by Marina Gorlach

The role of iconicity in the acquisition of Mandarin modal verbs and temporal adverbs by Japanese learners by Huichen Hsiao and Tzu-po Wu

An onomasiological model of onomatopoeia-formation by Livia kortvelyessy and Pavol Stekauer

It was great getting to chat to so many different people during the breaks! I got so wrapped up during the lunch break that I didn't have time to go to a restaurant so just grabbed a quick convenience store sandwich + onigiri. It's fine, I was more invested in continuing conversations! There was so much new stuff for me to be thinking about. I had some good questions about my presentation too, and suggestions for what else to look at in future work. The one linguist here who is like a celebrity to me, Pamela Perniss, even attended my talk and asked me questions and seemed really invested in it!! So cool!! I was a little bit star struck. I also met a linguist who did her PhD at UVic, Mihoko Teshigawara, which was awesome! We got talking about various people in the department, and B.C. things generally.

It was a bit of a shame I couldn't stick around after the conference wrapped up for the day, I know some people went to get dinner together afterwards, and there were some folks I wanted to continue chatting with. But I had to run off to go back to my hotel, change out of my now very sweaty shirt (my body still gets nervous even if my brain doesn't, bad for an already sweaty person), quickly eat dinner at a restaurant nearby, and then go to a concert. Wild. I knew it was a pretty bonkers plan when I bought the tickets, but I couldn't resist.

For dinner I went to an Indian place near my hotel, and struggled through communications since they didn't speak English. But I ordered a vegetarian set, which I figured was pretty safe. I was reassured by the staff (in Japanese) that there was no meat in it, so!

As it turns out, the small soup served with the combo 100% had meat in it. That was kinda silly. I figured that out pretty quickly though so didn't eat much. The salad, curry, pickles, and breads were good though! I had to eat it so quickly since I was on a time crunch, which was exceptionally difficult because it was piping hot. It was also the first full, balanced, healthy meal I'd eaten all day (actually, I ended up getting in the zone and skipping dinner last night too) so my stomach was needless to say a bit overwhelmed. I am very glad I got a big dinner though, I really needed it after slacking on eating for the previous 3 meals. Whoops. Don't be like me.

I wrapped up and jumped back on the subway to the concert arena, about a 15min transit away. I got there 15mins before the concert started, the perfect amount of time to get to my seat and not have to wait long!

The group I was there to see is called XG. They're a group made up of 7 Japanese members, but they promote in the kpop industry, but all of their music is almost exclusively in English...so they're kind of hard to define. They also have a wide variety of genres in their discography, so they can't even really be categorized as jpop/kpop, when a lot of their music is rap or hiphop inspired, with a few ballads as well. They're a super cool band, I've been peripherally aware of them since they debuted in 2022, but started actually paying attention to them around 2024, with my recent investment in them starting towards the end of 2025. They're super eye catching, their outfits and styling are really unique in the industry, with their album photoshoots being just visually so stunning! XG's general concept (to my understanding, I don't know as much about their lore as I do for example ATEEZ) are that they're ?aliens? from outerspace? but also they have a lot of wolf imagery? I'm not so clear on it. But a lot of their styling leans towards this alien, fantasy, otherworldly vibe. And, all the videos in between sets at the concert were very much about their space travels and interplanetary ventures.

Seriously, their album photoshoots and music videos are so fucking cool. If you watch only one music video by them, I have to recommend Gala, it's so good and their choreo is awesome!

The seats I had for the concert weren't the best, but hey, I was still seeing XG perform in Japan, so I can't really complain. At least the people in front of me stayed sitting, so I didn't have to stand the whole show! XG put on a spectacular performance, with live vocals even better than their studio versions, precise and intense choreography, really interesting stage outfits. It was incredible!! It also felt really special to me because XG is the first and only group in the kpop industry to have a member who is out as transmasc nonbinary, Cocona (he/they). He only just came out recently, and has talked about the endless support from his group, the company's CEO, the fans, everyone. He's been super open about his experience with gender too, even posting pictures of his top surgery scars. I really didn't know if I would ever see that in the industry. It's so emotional, and I'm not even the person having to go through navigating that in very homophobic countries! When they came on stage and Cocona sang their first line, I absolutely did start tearing up. The industry is moving in really positive directions, with more idols coming out as queer if they can, or signalling queerness even if they can't/don't want to come out, and it's all so beautiful to see. I'm so grateful for idols like Cocona who are taking these gigantic first steps, because surely it will mean that others can or can feel comfortable doing the same. I have a lot of feelings about it, y'all.

Overall it was just a bonkers day to go from getting very little sleep and eating not enough food and drinking too much coffee, to actually giving the conference presentation I'd been chipping away at for months, to going to an intense concert in a totally foreign city. What an experience!! I was friggin exhausted when I got back to the hotel (it wasn't even that late...) which is why I'm posting this a day later. I was extremely happy that the first talk of the conference day 2 wasn't until 10am! Since I don't have many notes from day 2, I'm just putting it in this same post.

Conference second day

I'm super glad I presented on the first day, since that meant I could just chill and enjoy the rest of the talks for the remainder of the conference, with my full attention. What with it being day 2, most folks were visually familiar to me now or I had talked to them yesterday, so I was more comfortable engaging in conversations! I got to have some follow-ups with people who wanted to talk to me after my presentation yesterday too so that was nice. One presenter even told me that some of the people who had gone to dinner after the conference wrapped up yesterday were talking about my presentation and were really impressed by my research...that was so exciting to hear!! My work being talked about without me there?? Unheard of!

I managed to get actual lunch today, at a Chinese restaurant on campus. They didn't have any English menu but thankfully the machine in my pocket could translate from a picture of the menu so I was somewhat confident I could get meatless food. Indeed, once I was there I checked the menu again and asked the employee about the dishes I was most confident were meatless, in very very simple Japanese, and they assured me that yes they were okay. There was an insanely cheap lunch combo of a rice dish plus a ramen dish, so I went for kimchi fried rice and negi ramen (somewhat spicy broth with a bunch of thinly sliced green onions on top). The ramen broth was certainly meat, but like, whatever. It was a ton of food for ~$7.50 and I wasn't sure what the dinner situation would be like so I was happy to fill up.

I tried to attend a variety of talk topics rather than just sticking with the linguistic-y ones, to get more perspectives, even if I am initially drawn to the linguistics ones. Here's what I attended today:

Iconicity bootstrapping hypothesis for the acquisition and evolution of language, plenary talk by Mutsumi Imai

The (in)flexibility of classifier handshapes: Iconic depiction in two unrelated sign languages by Vanessa Tsang, Thomas Finkbeiner, Markus Steinbach, and Aaron Yiu Leung Wong (Vanessa and I really nerded out about classifiers when I went to ask her some questions about her talk during a break!)

Iconicity and handshape type frequency in Taiwan Sign Language by Jane Tsay and James Myers (Jane had a lot to tell me about the history of Taiwan Sign Language when I asked her some questions during the break, and suggested a great book I should read about history of signed languages around the world)

How "no littering" pictograms construe events: A cognitive linguistic analysis of action chains and profiling by Ayaka Nishimura (one of the attendees I ended up chatting with the most! She has been so friendly!)

Beyond words: Multimodal iconicity in Judith Gautier's Japonist poems by Ibtihel Ghourabi

The iconicity, indexicality, and frequency of lines in comics and manga by Irmak Hacımusaoǧlu, Ana Krajinović, and Neil Cohn (such a fascinating topic that really got me thinking about the analysis of comics, I had never heard anything about this before!)

Sonority sounds beautiful, round, friendly, erotic—but why? Effects of iconicity and indexicality on language attitudes by Simon David Stein

Iconicity and visual languages in a multimodal language faculty, plenary talk by Neil Cohn (holy heck this guy is cool, I would love to work with him)

And then the posters I got to see today (again, only a subset of the total):

A chronotopic analysis of iconic gestures in rock climbing narratives by Kuniyoshi Kataoka (lots of discussion of gestural viewpoint, which I know a lot about, so it was cool to talk to Kuniyoshi and compare points from what he noticed in his narratives to what I notice in Hul’q’umi’num’ storytelling)

Cross-cultural differences in gesture use in comics: A corpus-based multimodal analysis by Kazuki Sekine, Konoka Yanase, Kadota Keisuke, and Neil Cohn

To translate or not to translate ideophones in manga: It depends on meaning by Mai Mori and Kimi Akita

Such a full day! I also ended up chatting a lot with Leah Pappas, I wasn't able to attend her talk yesterday (being at a different session) but our areas of research/interest are somewhat similar, and she is also here not knowing anyone and pretty new to the field of iconicity, so we had a lot in common. I'm very grateful for everyone who has been so nice and welcoming and open to conversation.

After day 2 concluded we walked a short distance to a restaurant on the edge of campus for the conference dinner, buffet-style variety of dishes and drinks, with tables in the centre and standing room around to encourage mingling and conversation. There was about 4 different vegetarian things I could eat, which was great!! I had no idea what my options would be. I took zero photos, but there was some salad, roasted potatoes, vegetarian "meatballs" (kinda like the Ikea vegetable balls) in some creamy sauce, and vegetarian Japanese-style curry and rice. And then mochi with peanut powder on it for a sweet(ish) treat! I was happy to use this time to keep talking with some of the pals I had made throughout day 1 and 2. I got to meet one of the presenters whose talk I couldn't attend but who works on ideophones, named Marta Herget.

I tapped out of dinner around 8pm, super tired of being "on" all day, and headed back to the hotel to finally write this post up! Tomorrow's a short day at the conference (just 10-1), and then I'll head to Ghibli Park with some of the other attendees! I have no idea how many. But the conference organizers suggested for those of us that are interested to take an excursion to Ghibli Park since it's just outside of Nagoya, and I absolutely couldn't resist! I've been so excited about it since I got tickets!! So, tomorrow's post will definitely include a lot more photos.

The conference is going fast and it will be sad to finish up tomorrow, but I have so many interesting things to read and I am so glad I know more people in this part of the field now. I really do enjoy coming to conferences!! I feel so lucky to be truly in love with what I do. Conferences are always a great opportunity to remember that.

I did not wake up at 6am to go to Fushimi Inari temple. It was not destined to happen. It's fine, I have to leave stuff to do next time I come to Japan, right? Getting a bit more sleep was more important to me this time.

I did get up around 8:30 and re-pack my bags since today was my last day in Kyoto. Moving my train to later in the afternoon was a great choice! I checked out at 9:30 and left my bags in the hotel baggage storage before heading out for the morning. It was a very convenient little self-serve baggage machine that put your bags in a dumbwaiter-type metal box until you needed them back. Very fancy!

First stop was breakfast at a cafe I had tried to go to on my first day in Kyoto but was too full. A frog themed cafe called Kaeru! It was, like, tastefully frog themed. The cafe had a very laid back but serious-about-coffee vibe. When I walked in, one of the staff was sorting through beans before they were to be roasted, which was cool, since I didn't realize they roasted in-house. I initially was just expecting like a muffin or scone breakfast or something, but they had cheese toast on the menu so I got that and some banana bread. Their coffee menu was extensive - they had 3 or 4 blends, and then like 6-8 single origin beans you could choose from for a pour over. I went for a single origin from Brazil! The cheese toast was more like a pizza toast, it made for a tasty breakfast.

After breakfast I jumped on the train about 20mins north to Kyoto Botanical Gardens. I can never pass up a visit to some gardens! It is apparently "the oldest and most comprehensive public garden in Japan," according to the brochure I got at the entrance. The outdoors of the grounds were understandably still pretty dormant, with only a few plum and cherry blossoms, camellia, snowdrops, and daffodils blooming. There was a section that displayed around 40 different bonsai though, that was very cool! They also weren't blooming/leafy yet but there were plenty of pines to appreciate.

The main event (for me at least) was the conservatory, which was huge! I didn't get a photo of the outside but even that was cool to look at and appreciate the architecture, all glass panes in swooping curves. The botanical gardens I've spent the most time at are Allan Gardens in Toronto, which are lovely and a nice size, though not nearly as large as the Kyoto conservatory (which is apparently 4,700㎡). As I was walking through it room by room, I was surprised that it just kept going! The walking paths wound through the rooms in gentle slopes, taking you through a wide variety of different plants from all parts of the world - dry and wet tropics, alpine, highland, lowland, desert, even a small section with aquatic plants from different regions. It was for the most part very warm and lush, a welcome environment compared to the cold gray outdoors.

I took, of course, way too many photos of the flowers! So, some more photos are posted below. They were all so beautiful, and even still I only took pictures of a small fraction of them. All the information signs were exclusively in Japanese, but that's fine, I was just there to take in the sights and smells.

There were all sorts of flowers I had never seen before, keeping me interested at every turn. Including some really cool pompom-like ones! I wanted to dawdle but being on a bit of a time crunch I couldn't be quite as leisurely as I normally would.

They also had green birdflowers (pictured above) which I had heard of before and seen photos of, and this was my first time seeing them close up. They really do look like little tiny hummingbirds clustered around the stem!

Towards the end of the path, they had a very impressive collection of orchids - like, probably at least 40 varieties. I have never seen that many different kinds in one place! Some of them were extremely intricate.

All in all, it was a lovely way to spend the morning. I didn't get the chance to walk around the entire grounds of the Gardens, but absolutely would go back, maybe in the summer or later spring. There are gardens for cherry trees, maple trees, conifers, Japanese iris, waterlilies, lotus, peonies, hydrangea, rhododendron, and roses to name a few.

Between the Gardens and the hotel was a Traveler's Factory so I stopped off to pop in there, and get some of their stamps to add to my book! This was in addition to two stamps at the Gardens. One of the Travelers' stamps bled quite badly through the page which is unfortunate but I guess a risk I run.

Near the Traveler's was a bakery I really wanted to visit (having missed the location in Tokyo due to lack of time) called amam dacotan, since all of their pastries and food looks so good. Unfortunately, there was a line out the door (it being around noon by this point). Any other day I would be standing in that line regardless. I was very conscious of the time though, with my train leaving at 2:30 and still being a little far from the hotel and station. There went that lunch plan. Nishiki Market was not a far walk from the area and I was maybe going to go walk through there, but I'm pretty sure most of the food stalls would not be vegetarian, and I wasn't looking for much of a "wander around for the vibe" on my time crunch. I didn't want to spend time researching a different place for lunch in the area... so I went back to that lovely cafe from breakfast yesterday! It was close to the hotel that I needed to get back to for my bags anyway, and I knew I could find something I liked there. Maybe a bit silly to go two days in a row, but hey, it was really good.

The cafe was about a 20min walk or transit, so I opted for the transit, having just enough time to kill that it wouldn't stress me out. Today I elected for a walnut miso bagel with cream cheese, and also took a carrot cake bagel for later (that I ate upon arriving at the hotel in Nagoya - as it turns out, it had rum raisins inside!). Just as good as yesterday, as expected!

It was a nice quick meal and I was on my way to Kyoto station with my bags in good time. Good enough time that I had a bit of waiting around at the station but I'd rather wait there than anywhere else. I got a bit turned around with what section of the station I needed to be in, and SAW the station stamp past the ticket gates I explicitly did not need to go through :( shame! Can't get em all.

The train I had switched my reservation to was a slightly slower train, making more stops and taking 1hr instead of 30mins, not that I'm complaining. I had no other plans for the rest of the day except get to my hotel in Nagoya, and finish up my presentation for tomorrow. Because despite my (not quite best) efforts, I'm still working on it down to the wire. Classic academic move. I've heard it never gets better. At least giving conference presentations is old hat to me now, so I'm not stressed about it, I know it will go fine. I'm in literally the last presentation slot of the day tomorrow, a bit of a shame because I like getting it over with in the morning, but at least it's on the first day and I can fully enjoy the other two days of the conference!

Anyway, once I got to Nagoya, navigating the local trains was pretty simple and I found my hotel without issues (Hotel Rubura Ohzan). I wasn't sure how much they would speak English as it's not a very central area of the city (sort of midway between Nagoya station and Nagoya University, the campus the conference is at). I had no issues though!

I still have to decide what I'm going to do about dinner, since I appear to be in a bit of a dead zone with respect to vegetarian options... it seems like there might be some options at one of the hotel restaurants, but not a ton. That or I'll go seek out an Indian and Nepalese restaurant about 5 minutes away. I had some onigiri to get me through the afternoon at least!

In addition to finalizing my slides tonight, I'll also be making note of which talks I want to go to tomorrow. There are 3-4 concurrent sessions all 3 days, it's a big conference! The plenary talks are all going to be really interesting too. I don't quite know what I'll blog about during the conference days, since I know conferences tend to overload my brain and I really enjoy everything I listen to and learn in the moment but actually reporting back what I learned is never quite as successful. I made sure to get a dedicated notebook for the conference though, I always take notes during the sessions! I only recognize like, 3 names of other presenters (which includes one of the plenaries) so I am going to learn a lot of new things!! I'm so used to the Salish or [North American] Indigenous Languages conferences where I know at least 1/2 of the presenters. It's a totally new environment for me here!! I'm sure I'll have more to report on tomorrow than I might assume now. I am also looking forward to a few days of primarily using my brain over my body. I'm friggin tired.

So, I think I learned that 7 straight days of doing multiple things every day is my limit. I did not want to do anything when I woke up today. I forgot to turn my alarm off so it woke me up at 8 (at least I had turned off my 6am one from yesterday!), but I really needed a lazy morning. I had laundry on my to-do list, but had also been eyeing a breakfast place a short walk away so decided to do that first before coming back to the hotel and doing my laundry.

The cafe was called Dining 603, and I'd seen online that they made really interesting flavours of bagels in-house, and had a good breakfast menu. Oh my gosh, this place was so pretty! It was really quiet and peaceful, with a nice white plaster and wood interior, and soft classical piano playing. There were indeed probably like 30 different flavours of bagels arrayed at the front, only a few of each kind. I got there around 10 and was expecting it to be bumping at prime breakfast time, but there were only 2 other couples there. One couple was speaking French and the other couple was speaking Korean, so it was kinda funny to be able to eavesdrop on both. The French couple actually were staying there - there was a guest house above the cafe! So cute.

I went for a multigrain bagel with butter and housemade red bean paste, and a side of scrambled eggs. It sounded so good on the menu and I wanted something simple with the red bean paste, but on my way out picked a more exciting bagel flavour for later. The bagels were pretty small, so it made for a good snack later. I wasn't really expecting the butter to be, like, a whole slice in there? It was very good though so I can't complain.

The coffee was also delicious, I think it was a pourover, and came in a super cute mug. I couldn't tell it if was a frog hanging onto the ginko leaf or just a little creature, but it was charming either way. I'm happy I found this place, it was a lovely start to a relaxing day!

Back at the hotel I had a really non-exciting hour and a half of doing laundry and writing up yesterday's post and working on my presentation while I waited for the machines to finish. The lounge setup at the hotel is quite nice though so at least I had a good workspace and unlimited coffee. Once that was done I went back up to my room to laze around some more, snack on that second bagel I had gotten (sesame and (Japanese) sweet potato!) and feel just a little bit guilty about not doing anything all morning/early afternoon.

I ended up deciding to switch my train to Nagoya tomorrow to a later time. Originally I had it booked for 11am, but it's only a half-hour ride, and I can't check into my hotel in Nagoya until 3 so I was going to find something to do in the city until then. But, the fact that I had to take this morning off for my own good meant that I wasn't getting to things I had on my list for Kyoto. Aaaand I don't really have anything on my list for Nagoya since my days there are going to be filled with the conference, and my afternoons/evenings are already planned out. So I switched my train to 2pm instead and planned my itinerary for tomorrow morning in detail to ensure I still do everything I want.

As I was sorting out tomorrow's plans, I was nearly talking myself out of the itinerary I had sketched out for this afternoon (the half day that I had to move from Tuesday due to the sento (public bath house) on my list being closed). I was just feeling worn out, and tired, and not really into the idea of a new kind of stressful experience, having not been to a sento before. I was truly just getting in my own head about it, it's just a bath house! I think it had just been a long week, which is totally valid, in my day-to-day life I am nowhere near this busy and always have a lot of downtime. However, I knew I would end up regretting it if I didn't go to these places, so I mustered up the energy to get out the door. Always the hardest part. I put on a cute but cozy fit to get me through it! (man I really hope my next hotel has better lighting)

The sento I had bookmarked, and actually the afternoon itinerary, was totally put on my radar by a random Reddit comment when I was searching for tattoo-friendly onsen in Kyoto. They had mentioned the Funaoka Onsen but also that it was good to combine with Funaokayama Park, Kenkun Temple, and a restaurant called Sarasa Nishijin. These were all close to Kinkaku-ji which was also on my list of places to see, so it all made for a perfect little route. Kinkaku-ji is like incredibly famous and I was hesitant about the crowds, particularly since by the time I ended up getting out the door, the 45min transit got me there around 4pm, and I thought it would be super busy. It wasn't actually that bad, I guess because it closed at 5?

This Buddhist temple is famous for its golden pavilion at the edge of a pond with beautiful surrounding landscaping. The lands of the temple originally belonged to the Saionji family, and the original temple they had built there was destroyed, but the pond remained. In 1397, the third Ashikaga Shogunate, Yoshimitsu, had the current temple built, including the pavilion covered in gold leaf. I can see why this place is so famous - it was absolutely stunning. I think I actually timed my visit quite well, as the sun was on its way down, glinting off the pavilion at a great angle. It was unbelievably bright, which none of the photos I took captured! Like, blinding to look at for too long, but I couldn't help it. I was really captivated by how the reflection looked in the gently rippling pond.

Walking through the grounds there were some gentle streams and waterfalls, and a few other buildings that we couldn't get that close to but could still appreciate. I was really intrigued by the pine trees outside of the abbot's quarters. Branches were propped up by bamboo lattices, and I wasn't sure why this would be, since it didn't seem structural. At other shrines I've seen wooden beams supporting tree branches or trunks, but never lattice platforms like this. I wondered if it was to give the tree an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of branches.

Upon trying to google "Japanese pine trees supported by bamboo platforms," I only got results for a preservation technique called "yukitsuri" which looked quite different. In this, strings are tied to branches and then to a central pole. This is done to support the weight of the branches under snow during the winter. So, maybe what I saw was a similar technique just looked different?

(photo credit!)

In any case, it was cool to learn about yukitsuri as a result!

After I wrapped up my round of Kinkaku-ji, it was off to Funaokayama Park, a ~10min walk away. The random Reddit commenter had said it's a park with nice trails to it and a great vantage point over the city, as well as a small temple at the top. They weren't kidding, the view was incredible! Photos didn't do it justice! By this point the sun was setting enough that the mountains in the back had that faded, misty look to them and the whole city was getting tinged in a warm tone. The trails around the park were practically empty, with only a few folks near the top similarly admiring the view. It was amazing to see the city sprawling out all around and below me.

Kenkun shrine, a Shinto shrine, was a short walk away from that first viewpoint. I learned while writing this that Mount Funaoka is where Genbu of the North was sealed. Genbu, a black tortoise, is one of the guardian beasts of the four cardinal directions. The mountain also used to be one of the main burial places of the region (in addition to Adashino, which I had visited on Tuesday). There's definitely a rich history to the place, and I am grateful for the chance to learn about it.

I worked my way carefully down the mountain (there were some mighty steep stairs!) and headed to the recommended restaurant, Sarasa Nishijin. This is a restaurant in an old public bathhouse! The onsen dates back to the 30s, but in 2000 was bought and turned into a restaurant. It was so cool! Original tiles were left along the walls, and I sat facing the partial wall that originally separated the men's and women's side. The bathroom also contained some original fixtures (a tiled basin and tap). Absolutely the most unique restaurant I've been to. I got an early dinner of a rice bowl with tofu, cucumber, tomato, and a soft boiled egg along with a chai to warm me (another chilly day today!).

They had some great sounding cakes and fancy drinks, but I needed a proper meal before heading to the sento. I didn't want to pass out in the hot baths, something that I absolutely would do. In fact, when I was reading back through old trips on this very travel blog, I found that I had at one point casually passed out at a museum in Paris. Totally forgot about that. Whoops. Anyway, I was trying not to repeat that.

I mustered up my courage for new experiences and walked down the road to Funaoka Onsen. It was built in the 1920s, and was apparently the first sento in Kyoto to have "denkiburo," a bath with an electrical current running through it! I was so intrigued by this when reading about it. The staff at the front were very nice, and even though I had read online that it was tattoo-friendly, I confirmed it again with them. I headed in to strip and wash off before entering the baths. My nerves weren't so much about being naked with a bunch of strangers, that's whatever, it's just a bath house. Although I did wonder if I'd get any weird looks/comments for my post-top surgery body, as well as my many large tattoos (I didn't) (there were a ton of foreigners with big tattoos). It was more about being a silly white person coming into an old, respected place and doing the Wrong Thing. But I read up a lot beforehand and heard some women in the change room speaking English so made sure with them as well that I was doing the appropriate things! As expected, I had just gotten way too in my head about it.

Once I was in there, holy heck was it ever nice. In the main room there were like 5 different baths of varying temperatures and tub designs. One had jacuzzi jets, very nice after a week of walking around and being on trains and buses. The hottest baths were absolutely too hot for me - even the medium-hot one was a challenge. Of course my glasses fogged up like crazy. The electric bath was super strange, but also really cool. I only put my legs in to above my knees, but the feeling reminded me of when I had physical therapy that involved sending shocks through my body. Strange, but oddly relaxing. It really was like getting a bunch of static shocks all at once, or like pins-and-needles but More. I couldn't stay in it long but I did go back a few times because it did feel nice on my tired legs and slightly inflamed knees.

I asked a couple other foreigners in there if they knew where the cold bath was, since I was indeed rapidly overheating, and we ended up going to find it together. It was outside, in an open-air bath! There was both a cold side and a warm side, it was two pools done with rocks around the edge, and a dragon shaped statue with water showering down from it and a little waterfall as well. It was still secluded but I could look up to see the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and a few trees. I ended up staying in those baths the most of the time I was there because it was so nice. I got chatting with the other two women, and that was the most social interaction I'd had since the 14th, so very much needed and appreciated. They were visiting from the US for a week, and we talked a bit about what we had each been up to in Japan and our other plans, and about our families and jobs. Really a bit of everything! I hadn't really realized that I had been kind of missing out on just talking to people.

I obviously couldn't take photos, but here's some from online. Apparently, every day they switch which side is the men's and which is the women's, but since I went only tonight I have no idea how they differ. I hope both sides have open air baths - if it's just the one, I'm glad it was the women's side tonight!

I ended up staying there for about an hour and a half. It was so nice, and I am really glad I went. On my way out I sat in the lobby area to drink a Pocari Sweat (like a Gatorade basically but gently carbonated and tastes like Sprite) and cool down before walking to the bus stop, wanting to make sure I was feeling okay. They had a TV playing the Olympics so I got to watch a Canadian and USA snowboarder do their runs of the women's snowboard slopestyle.

After that, it was another 40min transit back to the hotel, where I fully intended to turn in early (since I'm going to get up early to make it to a shrine by like 7). Well, that didn't happen as I'm finishing writing this around 11:30... oops.

I am really glad I had a slow morning, and also glad that I then pushed through my malaise. The afternoon itinerary was so worth it. Thank you, random Reddit commenter from 1 year ago. Totally made my day!