You Look Familiar

I’ve been here nearly a month, and I’m realizing just how small the foreigner population is in Japan.  Everywhere I go, I run into the same people.  It is really easy to pick us out and perhaps the foreigners just go to all the same places, but there is this amazing feeling when I recognize someone in such a strange place.  I actually met a Japanese guy in a bar called Fubar a couple weeks ago and then ran into him again just the other day at a ramen restaurant.  It’s bizarre that in a city of millions I can run into someone in a totally different neighborhood.  Of course, I didn’t recognize him, he recognized me.

Osaka has this awesome music bar called Rock Rock.  This past Friday they were having an independent music night so Edward, Josh, and I went to check it out.  They were playing stuff like MGMT, Passion Pit, Oasis, The Killers, and New Order.  The crowd was really into it and I felt right at home.  We didn’t leave until six in the morning.

A couple of us went to sing karaoke the other day.  I’m slowly expanding my set of singable karaoke songs.  They have a much better song selection in Japan than America.  They actually have Sublime songs here!  Karaoke is extremely popular in Japan and it’s mostly “box” karaoke where you get your own room.  It seems to be a weekly event for some groups and people have been known to have eight hour karaoke sessions.

Osaka is getting a little cooler each day and it feels so much nicer as it gets closer to San Francisco’s weather.  I can actually walk around without sweating through my shirt.  It was feeling so nice that this past weekend I biked over to Nakanoshima, a pleasant area filled with parks and museums on which is made up of a few islands in one of Osaka’s rivers.  I snapped a few pictures (I keep meaning to take more pictures).

 Park on the island

People Boating Between Islands 

 Osaka Library

 I think this is an art museum

   Art Museum? Plaza