Saturday, 10 November 2012
After two weeks on the road, Madam had designated the two day stay in Osaka as a rest and recreation spell, and after the previous night's indulgences, rest and recreation was definitely what I needed. It started with a long soak in a warm bath, which did some good, but not enough to overcome the effects, and after breakfast at the downstairs coffee shop I would have been happy to roll the rock across the door and hibernate, but we were faced with an eleven o'clock checkout time and a move to fresh quarters.
Friday night's hotel had been selected with an eye to convenience (and very convenient it was) but it had one major drawback. It didn't as far as Madam's initial research could make out, offer a coin laundry, and after the two weeks on the road we'd have a pile of washing that would need to be done.
That was what prompted the relocation, and neither of us was happy when she found that the first stop did, indeed, offer such a service. Had it been evident when the bookings were made we'd have stayed put, I could have taken further recuperative baths and the washing could have been started much earlier, giving Madam the chance of a longer rest before we set out to dinner with The Principal.
As it was, we left the checkout as late as possible, took ourselves out for a walk with the baggage in the cloak room at the old hotel, located the new one and made a futile attempt to kill time before the check-in time there.
We headed down to the middle of the business section of Osaka, an area that would presumably have been much busier from Monday to Friday, and while things were pleasantly quiet my head throbbed as a result of overnight overindulgence and my right knee was doing something similar as a result of something I'd presumably done just before we'd shipped the Black Monster back to Kobe.
The knee had been troubling me on and off for the previous couple of days, not to any great extent, but enough to make things uncomfortable. Now, when a lengthy walk might have served to remove some of the toxic elements from the system by way of exercise, the knee was saying, Hang on there buddy boy, this thing needs some rest.
So rest I did. In a park on the banks of a river while the knee delivered constant reminders that it was there and the head pleaded for somewhere to lie down and quietly expire. Eventually, on the off chance that we might be able to check in early, we headed over to the new hotel and made polite inquiries, which saw us upstairs and into the room well before the regular time. I slept, Madam ran the laundry routine, and still managed a bit of a spell before the evening appointment.
That proved, predictably, to be a much more restrained affair than the previous night's exercise, with a rendezvous that took us straight into Japan's longest shopping arcade, Tenjinbashi-suji Shopping Street. I've seen an arcade or two in my time, but not to many that stretch over more than two and a half kilometres. The roofed arcade grew out of a vegetable market associated with the Tenmangu Shrine during the Edo Period and today contains some six hundred stores selling all kinds of day to day items including groceries, clothes, snacks, used books, medicine, and assorted odds and ends. It's not high end shopping and, by all accounts prices tend to be low in and goods are of average quality. Not the place to go looking for Gucci handbags and the like.
But since it's an everyday shopping environment for everyday people it offers a range of eateries and cafes in the arcade itself, and there are more in the streets and alleys that open off the main arcade. You might be inclined to question Hughesy's assessment of a shopping arcade as packed with a bewildering variety of eateries, and in a common or garden arcade you'd possibly have a point in any other society, but a stroll through the eating and drinking quarter of most Japanese cities would sort that issue once and for all.
Many of them are izakaya, basically small bars that offer food to accompany whatever you're drinking, casual places often based around after-work socialising. Izakaya were originally sake shops that allowed customers to drink on the premises, sometimes called akachōchin (red lantern) since paper lanterns are traditionally found in front of such establishments. Nowadays the term usually refers to small, non-chain izakaya.
As the astute reader might suspect, Hughesy is a big fan of this concept, and would be a bigger fan if I was able to read the language and decipher the captions underneath the picture menus you tend to find outside. Somehow we never seemed to find ourselves in nomi-hōdai (all you can drink) or tabe-hōdai (all you can eat) places where, for a set price per person you can order as much food or drink as you can hold, though they tend to be careful to impose a two or three hour time limit.
On arriving you'll invariably find yourself being given an oshibori (wet towel) to clean your hands and possibly an otōshi (in the Kanto region) or tsukidashi (in Kansai) a snack or appetizer charged to the bill in lieu of an entry fee. From there the food quotient will vary according to the particular establishment, and food and drink are ordered throughout the session with food items usually shared by everyone at the table. I took a while to get used to the fact that the closest platter wasn't specifically mine, but the practice allows you to pick and choose. One thing you will notice is that such places tend to be light on for rice, which also threw me at first until I was told that you're getting your rice quota through the sake, which is, of course, rice wine.
Even if you're drinking beer.
Yakitori (grilled chicken skewers, often grilled in front of you go particularly well with Japanese beer, and I'm also quite partial to the cook it yourself Korean barbecue places The Principal guided us into one such establishment where we put several platters of marinated meats through the cooking process as various matters were discussed, and a couple of quiet beers were indulged in, then we wandered off to a Chinese place in a side alley.
The food there was good, a pleasant change from the seasoned Korean meats, and the combination as a whole worked rather well. Given busy schedules for Japanese high school principals and the need for weary travellers to rest we weren't up all that late, and a farewell two stops onto the return train journey saw us heading back through dark, semi-deserted but quite tranquil streets to the hotel, which this time wasn't as conveniently located with regard to the railway station.
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