Japan 2015: ７月１８日（土）

[Warning for sensitive readers: Later in this post I show pictures of ridiculous "lingerie." If for some reason you don't want to see funny underwear -modeled in picture on the package-, I'll warn you again when you are about to scroll down to those pictures.]

Today Nick, Kitty, Lane and I went shopping in Osaka. Even before we got done with the trains we saw two girls dressed at Mario and Luigi, and Kitty asked them to let us take their picture. So cute!

Mario and Luigi!

they have Anpanman character purses hanging around their necks

We were looking some at men's bags and men's fashion mainly for Nick, and also for 座布団 (zabuton, floor seat cushions) for me. Japanese fashion tends to be somewhat European-inspired. There are many types of shoulder bags for men, so it is more common for men to carry bags in Japan than in the United States, where men make use of spacious pockets more than bags. We saw some arcades along the way.

arcades are too cute here

make them stop

We didn't find a bag or clothing items for Nick, but we did find four zabuton for me. I have a Korean tea table, and I want to be able to entertain friends comfortably at it when I return to the US.

At one men's store we found a funny display with two different figures in the display windows resembling オバマ大統領 (obama daitouryou, President Obama). I took a picture and one of the staff talked to me about the displays. It turns out he attends the university I did two years ago: small world.

clothing store Obama

We also went to ドンキホーテ (don kihoute, Don Quixote), a quite varied shop aimed at foreign travelers looking to bring souvenirs back to their home countries. I managed to find 2 kinds of strange Kit-Kats that I will bring home for friends! It's a crazy store with many things on many floors, so Kitty and I got a little carried away and left Nick and Lane waiting for us outside. We laughed about funny underwear for quite a while, pictures will come at the end of this post.

Nick bought some takoyaki (dough balls cooked with octopus, in case you don't remember) that he was kind enough to share with us.

Finally, we decided we needed to do some laundry, so Nick and Kitty came with me to a コインランドリー (koin randorii, coin laundry) near my share house after dropping by the hotel to get their things. We were all really impressed with the 洗濯機 (sentakuki, washing machines) at the coin laundry. First off, there were large machines that did washing AND drying, one after the other, and even added 洗剤 (senzai, detergent) automatically! The machines were spacious enough for all three loads so we split the price by throwing all our things in together.

huge washing/drying machines

The coin laundry is only a minute walk from my share house so we hung around my house and drank 梅酒 (umeshu, plum wine) as we waited. We noticed only after completing our laundry that there was also a shoe washing machine specifically designed for washing sneakers. We were all impressed and kind of wanted to wash our shoes, but it was already past 2am. Tired but with clean clothes, the three of us walked 40 minutes with our suitcases back to the boys' hotel where Lane was waiting so we could head out to Tokyo the shinkansen together the next morning.