Greetings from, of all places, Osaka in Japan. I arrived at about 8 am and, by about 10 am arrived at my hotel near the Shin-Osaka railway station. This is the station I'll depart from tomorrow morning at 9am for the hour long journey to Okayama - the reason for my visit - so it was useful to have an inexpensive hotel, the Toyoko Inn, close by. By the time I got to the hotel, I'd been on the road for over 20 hours from London via Frankfurt and had managed 5 hours sleep. However much I needed some more, not to mention a wash and change of clothing, I could not access my room until 6 hours later!
So ditching my bags and armed with Y13,000 I headed for the region's main tourist attraction, Osaka Castle. By the way, the long journey from the airport to Shin-Osaka was fully urbanised, so I began wondering how many people live in the Osaka region, which is possibly Japan's Industrial / Commercial heartland. I quick surf of the internet came up with an astonishing figure. The Keihanshin region, which also includes Kyoto and Nara, has 18 million people, a little less than the whole of Australia! En route to the Castle (no pun intended for those in Santa Clara), I also booked my Shinkansen ticket to Okayama - more about that trip in another post. The cost of the journey stunned me. My one-way ticket came to Y6,260 or about A$85, so it might have been cheaper to take a taxi.It's certainly more expensive than this hotel. By the way, I managed all this, and the subsequent trip to the Castle, with only two words of Japanese: sayonara (auf wiedersehen or au revoir) and konichiwa (hello). This place is quite easy to navigate!
This post shows photos taken from the top (8th) floor of the Castle where there's a viewing platform over the whole city. It's a bit like New York or Paris where, the Empire State building or the Eiffel Tower provide panoramas of those cities. So, if you're interested in views over a city region of 18 million people have a look at the next four pictures:
The third of the pictures shows a low part of the central mountains of Honshu. By the time I took these shots, I was flagging in the 35C and 90% humidity ... it's the monsoon season. Fortunately, so far, there has been none of the forecast rain, though our flight path took us over sodden looking Beijing.
AS
So ditching my bags and armed with Y13,000 I headed for the region's main tourist attraction, Osaka Castle. By the way, the long journey from the airport to Shin-Osaka was fully urbanised, so I began wondering how many people live in the Osaka region, which is possibly Japan's Industrial / Commercial heartland. I quick surf of the internet came up with an astonishing figure. The Keihanshin region, which also includes Kyoto and Nara, has 18 million people, a little less than the whole of Australia! En route to the Castle (no pun intended for those in Santa Clara), I also booked my Shinkansen ticket to Okayama - more about that trip in another post. The cost of the journey stunned me. My one-way ticket came to Y6,260 or about A$85, so it might have been cheaper to take a taxi.It's certainly more expensive than this hotel. By the way, I managed all this, and the subsequent trip to the Castle, with only two words of Japanese: sayonara (auf wiedersehen or au revoir) and konichiwa (hello). This place is quite easy to navigate!
This post shows photos taken from the top (8th) floor of the Castle where there's a viewing platform over the whole city. It's a bit like New York or Paris where, the Empire State building or the Eiffel Tower provide panoramas of those cities. So, if you're interested in views over a city region of 18 million people have a look at the next four pictures:
The third of the pictures shows a low part of the central mountains of Honshu. By the time I took these shots, I was flagging in the 35C and 90% humidity ... it's the monsoon season. Fortunately, so far, there has been none of the forecast rain, though our flight path took us over sodden looking Beijing.
AS
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