Today, I not only left the house, but I even left Tondabayashi! I took the train into "the city" (I lucked out with an express train, which was very quick) and went to an outdoor market called Shinsaibashi. I read about it on a website for tourists and I figured it would be worth checking out. It was forcast to rain, so I had a back-up plan to go to Umeda (which is, according to the website i looked at, the largest underground mall on earth). Fortunately, it was grey out, but not rainy.
Shinsaibashi wasn't quite an outdoor market. It had a roof (it was still open air) and many of the shops were indoors. It was still pretty cool, though not what I expected. More like a weird foreign mall than a market. There were mostly discount shops.
Above the train station was five floors of a department store called LOFT. Sort of like Ikea meets Target. It was a little pricey, so I didn't end up buying anything (although I saw these great slippers for about $25). A good place to buy gifts, though. Lots of cool, but useful, Japanese things. I liked the alarm clocks a lot. I'm weird. Also, the furnature was very cool. Expensive, but cool. After the department store, I walked around the market for a long time. It went on and on and on. I walked about 10 blocks of it before I started to get concerned about walking back. Plus, half of the stores I went into had separate entrances and exits, so I got really disoriented. I ended up buying a cotton long sleeve shirt for about $8. It has cute bottons. After a couple hours at the market, I thought I'd go and check out Umeda, since it has been so highly recommended by the other Americans. Also, I was on a mission to find a rotating sushi bar and this part of town didn't seem a likely place to find one.
Every restaurant I saw had the same standard menu. Rice bowls with breaded meat and other rice bowls with egg in them. I wasn't in the mood for rice bowls today.
Here is another intersection in the market. Every few blocks there were huge intersections and giant department stores. This one has "STEP" which is actually several stories of shoes, if I remember correctly. The shoes were expensive and ugly, so I didn't investigate.
So, Umeda turned out to be fairly similar to Shinsaibashi, but indoors and a little more upscale. It really must be the largest underground mall on earth. Or series of underground malls and aboveground malls. I got VERY lost. At first it wasn't a problem. I found a restaurant mall, which was on the 23rd-29th floors of a building above the train station.
I was excited because there was a sign for "sushi deli", which I figured might be a rotating sushi bar. It was worth a shot. So I took the elevator up from 1. 23-29 were the only buttons. I pressed 28. Then it went really fast. My ears popped. It ended up being worth the ride because there was a huge window with a view of the city. By then the sky had cleared a little and it actually looked pretty nice out. Unfortunately the "sushi deli" was a crappy restaurant with no rotating bar. I then wandered for a very long time. I started to get really hungry, but none of the food was very appetizing. Something about plastic 3D menus just doesn't do it for me. Also, there were 3 distinct types of restaurants. The most abundant were dessert and coffee restaurants with elaborate window displays and very long lines.
Fruit cup crossed with ice cream sundae is very popular here, though the fruit looks canned and... I think the same with the ice cream. The second and much less abundant type was the same rice and unidentified fried meats I found in Shinsaibashi. The third, and most horrifying, is the Euro/American fare restaurant. Spaghetti, Omlettes and Pizza are popular. None of them look edible. I ended up springing for green tea ice cream because it seemed like I'd be getting what I expected. I did. It was delicious. While enjoying my green tea ice cream, I encountered 2 wonderful things. The first being a GIANT red whale sculpture in the middle of a mall. It made me somewhat happy. Not as happy, however, as the next discovery: a GIANT red ferris wheel! I was going to take a ride (it was going extremely slow, which I bet is nice for small children and good dates), but it turned out to be 500 yen and I figured I'd eventually go on it not alone. It was tempting to get out of the crowd for a little while and 500 yen seemed like a bargain.
This is around when having no idea where I was became a little bit of a problem. Today is Sunday and I was convinced that the trains would stop running at some ridiculous hour like 5. I know, it's a paranoid assumption, but it started to get dark and I started to get a little concerned. I began wandering through the maze of underground malls in search of the train station (which, coincidentally, is IN the underground mall). I found my way back to the station and took the train back to the main station in Osaka. It was at this point that I realized I had no idea what line went back to tondabashi. This also happened to be the only station without maps in romanji (roman letters instead of japanese ones, which I'm still not good at reading yet). I took a somewhat educated guess and bought a ticket for maybe the right destination (i can always change my ticket when I get there). I went through the turnstyle and looked up at the huge announcement board to see that
my train had a footnote which looked like it meant it was at a different station. I went to a ticket taker and asked him where the train was and he said "japanese blahblahblah" and pointed somewhere else. A very kind gentleman behind me turned and spoke in very good english and explained that I was in the wrong place and should go and find someplace which I hadn't heard of. I received a refund for my fare and proceeded to get lost. About an hour and a near panic attack later, I returned to the same spot and asked a different man. He said "390 yen". I thought maybe he didn't understand me, but then he pointed at track 3 and I realized I HAD been in the right place and he was trying to sell me a ticket. This is a picture I took of a weird building right outside the train station after I found my way. I think the sky looks awesome. Then I took the train home. That was longwinded.
Today, the printmaking dapartment had its annual welcoming party. The lithography class hosted the party. They made a traditional Japanese stew and some kind of cabbage/meat thing. Alcohol was served. I've noticed that most events around here consist mainly of documenting them, so you might notice that everyone in the pictures has a camera. Also, people have camera phones in addition to very tiny digital cameras. It is common to have a case of memory cards to show your pictures during free time. I looked at Kumiko-Chan's pictures on the train to Kyoto on Thursday. During lunch today, I saw Ito-Chan's pictures from a trip to France and Swizerland this winter. 
The above picture is Ito-Chan. She is the TA in the woodblock department and one of the nicest people I've met. She is also very shy and nervous. So the stew they served contained many foods that have no english translation. Huge slices of a type of radish, called daikon, look a little like potatoes and aren't too strong in flavor. The tube-shaped food is some kind of fish product. It was sweet and had a texture like fried tofu. The grey triangular piece is rumored to be a potato product, but I think that may have been a translation error. It was like very thick jello and had a fishy taste to it. Not my favorite food. The stew also contained potatoes, fried tofu, and small hot-dog looking sausages. It was actually very good, but some of the ingredients were a little scary. 
