Before my current blog, my first one was about my experiences in Osaka, Japan .... I regret to say I have deleted it ... I wrote a lot of interesting stuff, then somehow a lot of nonsense crept into my writing so I deleted it .... what I should have done was to delete the nonsense and leave the juicy good stuff .... So what I'm going to do now is to try and write out of pure memory, and tainted brainjuice, the things that I remember about Osaka ....
The second picture is of Dotonburi, which is in downtown Osaka (this photo is taken from someone else's blog, something which I don't really like to do, but while I was in Japan, I didn't own a digicam ..... imagine the irony of that) ....
I didn't often go to this area, but you get to see a lot of interesting stuff here .... not the redlight district, mind you, though one time while I was walking with another bunch of Malaysians, or some other foreign students, I don't remember, I somehow chanced upon a XXX cinema .... It should be equally interesting to note that I was the only one who saw said cinema ....
Anyways, alongside the river there are a number of amusement arcades, and most of them have these innocent-looking UFO catchers (picture 3) .... Now, ever since I came to Japan, and whenever we were in town, I'd always been curious about these .... things, but never really had a good look at them ..... On that one particular day, my curiosity got the better of me ....
While my friends walked ahead, I went inside one of those arcades and looked at the stuffed toys they had ..... Let me tell you for a fact, in Japan the toys they have in those UFO catchers are way, way cooler than the ones we have here in KL ..... You can tell, in terms of quality, and most definitely in variety, even though all these toys are made in where else but China ....
Well, needless to say, I tried them out ..... My friends observed me first, and then they caught the bug ..... I could say for certain that I was hooked .... and lost quite an amount of money ..... It looks easy enough, you see ..... All you have to do is target the toy you want, strategise your move (only two moves anyway, one forward, one to left or right depending), put the coin in the slot, and let Chance do the rest .....
However, I don't know whether Chance did the hard work or was it our luck with the arcade assistants ..... You see, we got help .... My first attempt was for this cool-looking bag that has this cat which has this bleeding wound (picture 1) .... Well, one of the arcade assistants saw me going for it, and before I had the chance to put the coin in, she opened the glass door, moved the bag so that it was literally almost in the hole, and closed the door back ....
I stood there for a while, not sure what to make of it ..... Probably it was because the word "Tourist" was clearly stamped across our foreheads, and we were about to spend mucho moolah at their arcade .... Well, if I'm not mistaken, I think we blew more than 5000yen (approx. RM150) between the four of us .... I know I spent 2000yen .... but we did not walk away empty-handed ....
Each of us got a toy, two of us got two each, including yours truly .... the other one I had was this cat from The Aristocats, but I had to give it away, since I can't carry too many things back to Malaysia ..... which is a real pity, 'coz I also gave away a number of my Japanese language learning books which included the textbooks they used to teach us basic Japanese when we were there the first six months ....
I regret that decision now, but books are heavy ....... No, I should have brought them back 'coz I still had to pay for excess baggage no matter what, which cost me an arm and a leg, and then some .....
No comments:
Post a Comment