undershot

We took the express train to Umeda (the northern part of Osaka city) in search of electrical goods. We walked around in circles for so long that we had to stop for lunch. We found a nice restaurant with a very helpful owner. She explained how to order food (using a ticket vending machine) in Japanese, which took some time. Jodie looked up how to ask for vegetarian food [bejitarian riyori ga arimasuka], and they pointed out some dishes on the menu. They had fish in them anyway. Ah well :)

The electronics shop was on the other side of Osaka station. A monumental building [Yodobashi] with heaps of floors. Each floor was considerably bigger than the largest food supermarkets in Austalia. We had a long discussion with many locals about getting an adapter to plug Australian power plugs into Japanese sockets. One of them pointed out that it’s actually illegal, but our appliances claim to work on the Japanese voltage, so we got one anyway. It’s not quite right. It fits my Singaporan shaver fine, but the Australian plugs need to be jammed in really hard. The good news is that everything we’ve tried in it (Jodie’s laptop and MP3 player) works. Actually I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else try this, because the device may not be compatible. For example, some Australian appliances require an earthed socket, which are rare in Japan. We had to buy new power packs for our Nintendo DSes.

It was interesting to see that our local train company, Hankyu, also runs department stores at their major stations. Very posh stores with a huge assortment of expensive food on the bottom floor. The way they write their name for the stores looks just like the British store Harrods.

On the way home we took a local train instead of an express, so we got off one station too soon. A native (Hideyuki) found us looking lost and helped us out. It turns out that he works for ECC too, as a Japanese English teacher.