Flying to Osaka

Day 8   Tuesday, November 19, 2019  Shanghai to Osaka, Japan

This photo in Osaka is from the next day, because I did not have any good pictures from today with all our traveling from China to Japan.

On our way to the airport in the morning, we passed by Disneyland (the real Disneyland, not the Buddhist "Disneyland". LOL). It opened in 2016, and it was a kick to see with the usual fairytale castle and everything. In just its first 18 months, attendance was 5.6 million.

Steve had his final opportunity to tell us stuff:

1) During our days there, we traveled 630 miles.
2) < 20% of Chinese go to college, but not long ago, it was < 1%. Steve said the people are not only better educated, but with it goes better behavior (such as not pushing and shoving, he said, that we had in the boat line the night before from those less educated).
3) He mentioned that the pushing and shoving is based on a long history of needing to rush in life, to get food, to make a living, etc.

We arrived at our gate with plenty to spare before our 11:40 flight. Our group was NOT all on the same flight, so we would arrive in Osaka, as I recall, at three different times. My main memory from the airport was buying two bottles of spirits at the Duty-Free shop. I bought a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon for me, and an American Honey for Janet. They were to be cherished during our Happy Hours in Japan over the next week!

The flight to Japan was fine. I loved looking out my window on the left, as we passed over many islands during our approach. Once we landed at 3 pm, we found Gary, our guide, and waited around for the other flights to arrive so that we could depart. We weren't hungry because they had fed us during the 2½ hour flight. Janet and I already had lots of Yen that we had exchanged back at LAX.

The Osaka Airport is on an island, so our bus traversed a long bridge into the city, and we needed to travel only a short distance to our hotel. I think we arrived around 5 pm.

The lobby of our hotel was quite colorful. Gary had told us that our rooms here were going to be spacious compared to our later hotels, an ominous sign of things to come. The room here was okay, but there was not much moving-around space. It had two beds, so at least we had a place to put our luggage. No wash cloths in the bathroom, and NO COFFEE! They had the usual water pot  to boil water, as they'd always had in China, but there were no coffee packets, only tea. Potential disaster!

We also saw another sign of things to come in Japan, vending machines. The hotel lobby had about 10 of them, with all sorts of items to purchase.

We were free for the rest of the evening. There were many restaurants in the area, plus a large supermarket. I think everyone in our group went to that supermarket at one time or another. I went right away to buy coffee, plus snacks to go with our Happy Hour spirits! Luckily I did find one coffee product with the Nescafe packets, but it came only in a 36-packet box. That turned out to be a god-send, though, because none of the hotels in Japan had coffee, and we would use three or four every morning.

When it was time for dinner, we went with Mike and Jeanette and located a small curry restaurant I saw on a map I had printed out before we left home (many in our group, it turned out, bought their dinner items from the supermarket). We enjoyed our dinners, and got to know Mike and Jeanette much better. They are from Yakima, WA. The cost, including our Asahi beers, was very reasonable. We invited them back to our room to share more of our Happy Hour spirits, and had a nice (and cramped) time. Not much room for four people to sit in that hotel room.

Ready to see Osaka tomorrow!