Day 52 - Another failure, and Osaka Nightlife

Les and I had grand cultural plans today, aiming to go to the National Museum of Art and the Osaka Science Museum, as well as having a walk around the City Hall area of town, which is on an island in the river. We walked up from namba, all the way up Midosuji to the top. The area is pretty swish, with lots of sculptures, impressive buildings, and tree-lined avenues - very much like Gangnam in Seoul, in fact. When we got to the top, however, we realised that Les wasn't exactly sure where she was, which was a problem. We walked around for a while until she spotted the APA Hotel, meaning we needed to cross the river. The area around the riverbank is also covered with sculptures and trees, making it a nice place to get lost anyway. We found the Museums at 5 o'clock, which also happens to be exactly when they both closed, which was somewhat frustrating. They're really impressive buildings, apparently the art museum is all underground in a Louvre style, with a huge steel entrance hall that appears to have wings.

We went to a restaurant which claimed to be "Organique et Naturelle", just at the bottom of the APA Hotel. It was really good, and is underneath the Organic Tomato Cafe if anyone ever wants to find it. Our food was really good, and nicely presented, although they served us with the smallest glasses of wine I have ever had. We headed down to Tennoji afterwards, to watch a friend of Les' band play in a place called Tin's Hall. It was an awesome bar, full of surfboards and loads of other hippyish stuff, and it was also happy hour, meaning we could actually afford to drink there! We met a Canadian guy called Kwami, who has been here for four years, and is a Videogame Programmer, working on the physics side of things, which sounds like an awesome job to me. The band were pretty good (especially the bassist). We headed up to Ame-mura to meet Bill and a load of other Nova folk for Karaoke, but we got sidetracked by a moroccan shisha bar on the way there. As Kwami had by now missed his last tube home, he resigned himself to having to get the first tube home, and joined us for the rest of the night - that's a wierd thing here, the taxis are so expensive that in general people will choose to stay out until dawn rather than get one, even for a 20 minute journey - not like HK or Seoul, where a taxi is often a cheaper alternative to the subway, which itself is dirt cheap anyway! We found we had missed all the Karaoke by the time we got there, so we went on to another place (Bababushka, I think?) to wait out the night. On the way home Bill, Les, Laura and I went to the same Ramen place I went to the other morning (look at that, I'm now recommending things for them to do in Osaka!), which met with everyone's approval. I win at Osaka.