Ryoken And Comedy

Our Ryoken stay last night was very interesting. We stayed at Hotel Kuramoto. We checked out the onsen for a bit and it was nice to sit in a hot tub for awhile, but it just had one tub and wasn't as nice as the last onsen we went to. I was alone the entire time I was in there and only when I was leaving did a couple of ladies come in. Then we slept on our floor futons and it felt like a slumber party. Matt decided to sleep with his head opposite of ours because he suddenly feels that one should sleep with their head to the north. Oooookay. There was lots of giggling and poking fun of him for that. This morning they had a huge breakfast for us. I didn't even know what half the things where. There was cold salmon, ham, veggies, miso soup, rice, and various other things. I was a little overwhelmed because I hardly eat breakfast and when I do it's after my stomach has had a chance to wake up. It was good though. Here's a picture of breakfast:

We rounded our stuff up and checked out. We were able to leave our luggage there for a few hours which was nice since we couldn't check into our hotel until this afternoon. We wandered around the area for a few hours in the meantime. We checked out a market, walked through the Denden town (which is the electronics area), and got some lunch. Jack wanted sushi so we went to another one of those merry-go-round sushi places. I wasn't feeling it though so afterwards we went to a ramen place for me. Another thing I've been meaning to mention is all of the crazy kit-kat flavors here. I don't understand why it's such a thing but it is, and we found them again at the market today. I found at least 6-7 different flavors and I took pictures, there are more in the album. Other ones that I've seen that aren't pictured are sake (gross!) and strawberry cheesecake (yum!). I decided to buy the raspberry ones today to try and they were delicious! They make for a good snack too when you're hangry (which happens to me frequently when we're taking forever to pick a place to eat).

Eventually we gathered our luggage and made our way to the train station, where we took a couple of trains to Universal city. The hotel we're staying at for the next 5 nights is literally right outside the entrance gate to Universal Studios, and there is universal stuff all around us. Our hotel is the Park Front Hotel. It's pretty Univeral themed itself, with fun and wonky decorations and themes (it actually kind of reminds me of Epic). Our room is super nice, we're staying in a luxury room thanks to Jack.

We relaxed in our room for awhile and watched the last Harry Potter movie in Japanese on the Universal channel. We explored the area and found lots of over-priced restuarants and souvenir shops; I guess that's the drawback of staying so close to a theme-park.

So we choose to leave the theme-park attractions and go back to downtown Osaka for dinner. We got yakiniku, which in our experience means that you order meats and then grill them yourself on a mini grill at your table. We ordered two types of beef, two types of pork, and some chicken to all share. It was pretty good. The guys really enjoyed it. 

Then Matt and I decided to spend our Friday night at a comedy club; it was open mic night and it was all in English! Wohoo! It was an interesting crowd; people from all over the world were there: USA, Puerto Rico, Romania, Australia, the UK, Japan of course, and I'm sure there were others. It went for an hour and a half and it was really fun. There were 7 or 8 stand-ups and most of them were actually really good. You could tell a couple of them were a bit nervous but they still did a decent job Anyway, it was cheap and fun. It was at a club called "Ror" and I think they do comedy every Friday night.

So that was our big Friday. Happy Friday to everyone back home! My parents are in KC this weekend for my dad's 4 year check-up and I just got the text from my mom that all is well!!! So cheers to that, friends.

Also, shout out to my friends back in Madison, Will and Maureen, who are celebrating their last day at Epic today and soon to be traveling in Europe!