Octoballs! Katana Strikes! Cooking Death!

Ohio!

J Pop and Toby Sherona reporting from Osaka.  Osaka it to me baby, we are riding hard and taking no prisoners.

Today we met up with the epic and talented illustrator Koji Yasui a former ISX guide and all around great guy. Watch his transformation from Canada Koji, to Nippon Koji.  Conformity required at the border...

With our new found guide we headed to Osaka Castle, created to house and protect the Feudal General Toyotomi Hideyoshi around 1550-1680.  Many bad ass battles were fought here with real samurai slicing and dicing each other in the name of honour. Here is one being fought right now! Bonzi!

The castle has a working moat and is famous in the summer for cherry blossoms or Sakura.  For those Canadian:s out there, when you go to Sushi on Bloor and order a Sakura box, you:re ordering a cherry blossom box. Cool Eh?

Panda says; `When it comes to Kabuto, size Does Matter`
Note+ Kabuto is a helmet.

 

Next we try the Osaka famous Octoballs in Americamura or America Town in Shinshaibaishi.  It:s called takoyaki.  The sauce was created here and these little balls of squishy deliciousness just melt in your mouth.  Toby can fit five in there all at once. Sometimes you bit into one and it squirts all over. Some are salty, some are sour, and my favorite are the real saucy ones you see in the middle. Mmm,  balls.

We also tried our limited Japanese in Namba at the bridge famous for two things.
1. The Glico candy character you see here, everyone stops to take a pic in this pose and.
2. The bridge where guys spend all day trying to pick up girls.

You:re going to want to try this line.  `Antawa totemo kawai ee desne`
We failed. Hard.

Have you ever looked death in the face and found out it was a dead fish?
We wanted to avenge the near death of Mr. Homer J. Simpson and complete a fan challenge by trying death on a chopstick.  The slow painful poison of the FUGU fish awaited us and we took the challenge with a nervous smile.

Fugu is the deadly pufferfish, or blowfish, that crazy little creature that blows up when threatened and has spines all over.  If prepared wrong, it:s an angonizing death from a spine chilling neurotoxin.   Did that frighten Toby Sherona or J Pop.

NEVER!
We munched and lunched and came out alive.  Take that FUGU!

The night ended with an amazing surprise.
We headed to Koji:s bar where he works and over litre sized pints and meeting great new Japanese friends in walks Masako,  ISX intern extraordinaire with news that not only is she spending the night partying with us that she also has a place for us to crash in the mountainous hills of Osaka with her lovely family!  we are treated like Kings here.  Kings I tell you!

the thrill of communicating with people who don:t speak your language is very unique.  We tried everything from drawing on knapkins, singing, hand signs, and using very broken Japanese. More like Smashed/Mashed Japanese.  For instance our Blogging job here at Where the Hell am I Going was described with the hand sign for typey fingers, saying Blogo,  Jobo, air writing in an imaginary journal got us the word diary. Some smiles, head shaking and they understood Blogger. 

Ichiban.

Last we did another round of Purikura  and beat our record for number of people in one booth, up from 3 to 6.

Miss you all, love you all,
and happy birthday to Yu, the nice girl we met in the picture here and her boyfriend Suguru.

Toby Sherona and J Pop.

Hi Ya