When I woke in the morning I decided to go wandering around the area.
Whilst I was still sore, I was in much less pain than the previous day.

There was a typhoon during the night. I’m not sure as to how much Osaka was detrimentally affected by it as it was mostly in Tokyo, but I do know it led to rain whilst I was asleep.

It was still raining intermittently when I left the hostel.

Shortly after leaving I came across a shrine I decided to check out.
I imagine that during dry weather, the shrine would have felt calming.
It being wet made it feel calmer and more peaceful.

I stood in front of the shrine for a short amount of time and watched people approach it and pray.

I hadn’t prayed at any shrines before this and felt I was being culturally disrespectful by not doing so.

Once I saw a few people and saw that there was no one approaching, I gave it a go, then continued my wandering.

I saw a large sign advertising a temple.
As I liked the look of the temple, I took a picture of the sign to ask one of the people running the hostel about it.

Eventually I came across a café. I hadn’t had breakfast yet so I decided to go in.
I had a boiled egg with french toast (I think) and an iced tea.

Both were quite good and the hospitality provided was excellent.

I kept walking around for a while, following a canal (it may have been a river but I’m not too sure) for a few minutes.

During the walk (and before I had breakfast) I had three Boss coffees.

As I had been walking for a couple of hours, this lead to circumstances I had no excuse in not giving serious consideration before I had the coffees.

I decided to stop following the canal and started walking in a direction I hoped would lead me to a station that could get me back to 谷町九丁目駅 easily as my desire to wander more was steadily overtaken by my desire to find a bathroom.

I was also hoping to find a public bathroom along the way, but if not, if I reached a station, I could at least use the bathroom there before heading back to the hostel.

It was an incredibly intense fifteen to twenty-five minutes of my life.

There was a good chance of me not making to a bathroom as I could feel the pressure building in my bladder faster than I had hoped, with every step becoming more and more panic-inducing.

The struggle was real.

I somehow managed to persevere and made it to a station.

I asked the station agent there if they had a toilet.

He didn’t understand me (I doubt I was speaking clearly at the time), so I imitated undoing my pants, urinating, then washing my hands.

He then pointed me to the toilet which was behind the ticket gates.

As soon as I was on the other side I went straight to the bathroom.

That piss was fucking majestic.

I found my being encapsulated in a powerful euphoria as a deadly mission had reached a victorious and bloodless conclusion.

I ascended into another plane of existence as cascading waterfalls fell around me whilst the fish did their dance in the streams and the cro-AHH AHH AHH AHH AHH *flap flap flap* AHH AHH AHH AHH AHH!

Once I was done urinating I headed straight to the platform. Being two stops away from Tanimachi – kyuchome, I was able to get back pretty quickly.

I can’t remember if it was the previous day or at this point, but I discovered there was a lift after the stairs used to pass the train track.

I wished I had realised sooner.

When I got back to the hostel, I found out from Gabe that Ben had already checked out.

On my pillow he had left his penguin.

It was a small but nice token of our friendship.

I also asked one of the one of the staff about the temple I saw being advertised.

When I showed them the picture, they advised me the writing on the advertisement was Chinese.
They also told me that it looked a bit like the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, known as 金閣寺 (Kinkaku-ji).
As Gabe and I were going to Kyoto the following day, I decided it would be good to check out.

I still wanted to find record stores, so I headed to Namba Station and traveled north from there.

I found out there was a record store called “Root Down Records” near there, so it was my first destination.

I spent a little while wandering around, heading in the general direction of where it was.

Eventually I got to where it was, but I couldn’t find it.

I checked a few streets around, but couldn’t see it anywhere.

Once I was able to get an internet connection, I tried to locate it and found another record store called Newtone Records.

It was pretty close, so I made my way.

When I reached it, I couldn’t see it again.

I thought I may have been on the wrong street, but everything indicated that I was in the right location.

I asked someone as to where it was, but they didn’t know.

After a few seconds of them walking away, they came back and pointed it out.

It was almost right in front of me, up a few flights of stairs.

I went up, pushing past the soreness of my legs.

Then I found out it wasn’t open for a few hours.

I saw that Root Down was on a higher floor, so I went there, only to find out that it was also closed.

Whilst I had noticed it previously, it was at this point I became fully aware that there were many buildings with many different shops accessible by using the stairs.

Anyway, I went back to wandering.

It wasn’t long until I ran into King Kong Records.

Their range was absolutely massive.

I spent a bit of time looking around and seeing what they had.

When I hit the avant-garde section, I scoured it as closely as I could for Japanese drone and experimental music.

There was a fair bit of Japanese music there, but I had no idea what was and wasn’t what I looking for.

I went to the counter and asked if they had any Japanese drone music.

They weren’t sure what I meant, so I gave Merzbow as an example (as they stocked Merzbow, although I couldn’t see any (with that being said, I wasn’t interested in Merzbow at all)).

They then took me to the Japanese punk / hardcore section.

I ended up buying a Melt-Banana album (Cactuses Come in Flocks) and also a free experimental music sampler.

After leaving and walking around a bit more (and briefly stopping at a massive store with a whole lot of anime, manga, and OSTs), I ended up at Time Bomb Records.

They also had a good range but not what I was after.

Oh well.

On the way back to the station, I stopped off at an arcade and ended up getting what was, and still is, my favourite capsule vending machine item.

I’ll go into the details of it another time.

For now, I’ll say it’s sufficiently absurd and ridiculous enough for me to like it a lot.

Once I got back to the hostel, I saw that Gabe was there, so I told him about my trek and found out he’d been in the hostel all day.

He said he needed a day of rest.

I thought he was missing out a bit, but I let it be.

I decided I wanted to go check out Osaka Castle and asked Gabe if he wanted to come.

He still wanted to rest.

I caught the train to 谷町四丁目駅 (Tanimachi Yonchōme).

When I got off, I saw a guy looking at a map. When he was done, he saw me and smiled.
I smiled back and walked past.

I reached the grounds of Osaka Castle pretty quickly.

A few minutes after getting there, I saw the guy (Tim) who was looking at the map.

We started talking and decided to view the castle together.

The castle area was massive.

It felt very much like an area that was very far away from Osaka.

We spent some time walking around the grounds and talking about various issues before we went into the castle itself, which had been turned into a museum about the castle.

Around this time, my camera started having some frustrating problems with staying on.

It had mostly recovered from Mount Fuji, but due to the rain in the morning, it became worse.

At times it became quite worrying as I was worried it wouldn’t turn on again.

Luckily it worked again, but at times it will still have trouble staying on.

On a side note, my belt didn’t handle the rain on Mount Fuji well either.
It still holds pants up,, but by this point in the trip it lost it’s ability to do that well.

It was saddening for me as the belt had been doing well since when I got it in 2009.

Anyway, the view from the top was pretty amazing. It gave the best city view I saw during the trip.
A good portion of Osaka could be seen with great ease.
Whilst there were a good number of people there and the area was small, it was easy to get around which allowed more time taking in the view.

After we went back down, we spent a few minutes watching Kendo and Judo lessons at Osaka Shudokan, before heading back to the hostel.

We had worked out that we were staying in the same room at Tani-9 Backpackers and decided to head to Dinner with Gabe.

When we got back, I asked Gabe if he wanted to join us.
He did, so after resting for about thirty minutes, we headed off to お好み焼　もみじ (Okonomiyaki Momiji), which was almost directly across from us.

We had Sake and two okonomiyaki.

I never had an okonomiyaki before.
As my first time trying it, I felt it went well.

For one of them, we chose to have a possession as one of our toppings.
It was on the menu, and as we thought it was a funny translation, we decided it would be worth trying, so we could say we had a possession.

When we asked for it as a topping, the person who served us said what it was.

Unfortunately we didn’t catch what he said.

I can certainly say that I don’t know what it was, but it didn’t detract from the food.

Once we were done, we headed back to the hostel.

As we were all going to Kyoto in the morning, we decided to head there together, so we went to sleep pretty shortly after getting back to the hostel.