Day 46 - Addendum to yesterday, and window shopping

I feel I should also mention that we may have seen a man die yesterday. As we were waiting for Les at Umeda station, there was a bit of a cafuffle behind us, although noone was paying much attention. We had a little look for curiosity's sake, and there were a group of paramedics giving CPR to a body so limp and colourless that at first I thought it was a dummy. As we were leaving, they wheeled him away on a trolley, with his pallid arm hanging limply out of the side, from under the blanket. I was reminded of this as today we saw an old (maybe 60) man fall off the pavement, really hammered, at about 3 o'clock while his mate was hailing a Taxi. I went over to see if he was ok, and ended up half-carrying him to his taxi while he slurred Origato and Thanks alternately.

Preceding this, we went up to the roof of the OCAT building for a picnic and to say goodbye to Lawrence, another ex-Nova employee who's leaving Osaka. Yet again, another thing to do in Osaka which involves being up high and looking down on the city, something I normally love to do, however not instead of having things to do in the city itself. Les, Laura and I went for a wander round Shinsaibashi/Amemura/Dotonburi looking for various things, and I was left to my own devices for a few hours, during which I tried to cover as much of this area as possible. It's areally interesting place to walk around, a positive warren of shops, bars and restaurants, which I found to contain very few foreign ATMs. After a bit of window shopping I found a cool little cafe on the 2nd floor of a building just by the centre of the Shinsaibashi Mall, called Cocoa, which serves loads of variants on hot chocolate, in a very well decorated (by which I mean cluttered with every concievable piece of chocolate-related media) little establishment. Seemed like the kind of place Clare might really like, sort of like a cutesier, booze free Evaristo...

Tomorrow night we are apparently going for all-night Karaoke with Claudia (a german ex-Nova who I met today on the roof), after going out in Amemura. I'm a little apprehensive, to say the least.