Day in the Life of an Idiot

 
Image: Abeno Harukas, tallest skyscraper in Osaka (arguably in Japan.)

I'm not normally a fan of tours of buildings. With the obvious exception of things like museums, I will almost always prefer to walk a neighborhood than to go inside a capitol building or the top floor of the world's tallest whatever. However, I spotted this tour of Osaka's tallest skyscraper on HeyGo and thought, why not?  The tour guide for this one was Timea Yamamoto, a Romanian woman who is living in Japan (and from the looks of her last name, likely married or related to someone Japanese.) 

We started the tour at the train station, which was probably my favorite part?


Image: The Kintetsu Osaka Abenobashi Station in Osaka


Image: Another view of the pedestrian bridges of the station.

Someone on the tour remarked that the city of Osaka is not normally on a lot of people's tour itinerary. It is the third largest city in Japan, and the things I know about it are kind of vague. Comedy? Industry??  A unique dialect? Frankly, I would love more tours of Osaka just to see if it's the sort of place I might add to my list of places to see. 

But, back to the tour. Once inside the building, I lost a lot of interest. There are some nifty things inside. There's a museum and one of the largest department stores in Japan and several observation decks, etc., but it's a building? With stuff in it? The tour was specifically to take us to Harukas 300 (so named because it is 300 meters tall.) The trippiest part was the elevator ride, in which they have you look up at the glass ceiling and the elevator shaft has a light show as you travel upwards at great speed. Timea was a little dizzy once she stepped off the elevator.

We had a lot of connectivity problems at the top to the tower, which didn't frustrate me as much as you might think, because once you've seen the city scape once, the shine wears off quickly (at least for me)


Osaka from 300 meters up. (Note of interest, that big square section on the lower right is a cemetery.)

I also got a little sea sick near the end because Timea took us down into the gift shop and there was something about how the camera swung from one shelf to the next that made me a little nauseous. I'm normally okay with this stuff, but, for whatever reason, I couldn't cope this time, so I bailed out. 

This tour was still fun. Someone else on the tour was from Minnesota, someone named Lisa R., so that was cool? (Waving if you're an internet friend of mine!) But, I knew this one would be less interesting for me because of its subject matter. I'm just NOT a building person. I have done those things you're supposed to do in cities, like go to the top of the tall buildings, etc., (like in Paris, we did go to the top of the Eiffel Tower) but it never really does all that much for me.  

Otherwise, I had a quiet weekend. We did a bunch of errands and I worked on a new quilt.