I woke up to birthday wishes from Meghan. We fixed up some English Muffins and coffee and enjoyed a couple episodes while our hosts were off at work. With our breakfast gone and the Enterprise yet again safe, we started the finishing touches on our costumes for the Halloween/dual birthday party planned for that night. After a couple hours of work, the costumes were complete. We headed out for some lunch -bento lunch boxes and a couple balls of famous Osaka takoyaki; fried balls of batter and octopus. I got myself a little birthday present at Graniph Design and we headed back to meet our hosts.

After a bit of chatting with Liam and Hiromi, we donned our costumes, had a beer and headed out towards Tin’s Hall, the surf bar where two nights previous we had enjoyed burgers. The costume/birthday party was to take place there – alongside more delicious burgers. We arrived to birthday balloons and costumed party goers. The party was quite a good one with a fair number of costumes and a few people who had “forgotten” it was a costume party and were forced to wear some of the “so you thought you could get out of wearing a costume” costumes that we had brought along with us. After burgers and drinks, we jumped a train to Triangle Park near the second event – a Halloween party at a relatively small club.

Triangle Park, and if you’ve been to Osaka you know this well, is an interesting place. A small, well, triangle of concrete seems to attract a crazy variety of people – skaters, goths, punks, foreign business men, college students, hippies. That night, the crowds were out and in the middle stood a pedestal where an arm wrestling competition was going on (they were looking for participants). We people-watched for a bit and I enjoyed a Macadamia ice cream bar. We then headed to the tiny club.

It turned out the club was a rather good size. Some good djs. Some awful. We danced and eventually caught a cab home to hit the Thermarests hard – and pretty early as it was only about 1am. A birthday as good as any other. Thanks Osaka!

This morning was a slow one. We didn’t have much on the schedule so we spent much of the morning catching up on emails alongside toasted English muffins and coffee. Today was to be a day of preparation for the Saturday costume party in honor of Liam and me (Liam’s birthday being the 25th). Neither Meghan nor I had any idea what to do for our costumes but had decided a good way to go about discovering a costume would be to head to a 100yen store (equivalent of a dollar store) and limit ourselves to 500yen (5USD) each. 100yen stores often have tons of kooky stuff so we thought we could save some money and come up with something clever at the same time.

This turned out to be easier said than done. We milled about the 100yen store for some time and were eventually overcome with hunger. “Maybe our hunger is impeding our costume creativity,” one of us considered. We headed to a nearby restaurant to grab some tasty although smallish omurice (ketchup rice wrapped in omelet). Somewhat fed, we headed back to the 100yen store to further consider our options.

A good while later, we emerged victorious and had spent less than anticipated. Meghan was to be a Kindergartner (who, in Japan, wear colored hats and don massive, hard shelled backpacks) and I was to be a Japanese mailbox. Nothing too clever, but still fun. All that was left was to actually build my costume and build Meghan’s backpack. We headed back to Liam and Hiromi’s to begin the workshop.

Cutting and gluing. Measuring and bending. A couple hours later, our costumes were mostly finished and we headed out to meet Brad, another friend of ours who had moved to Osaka at the same time as Liam and Hiromi. From his apartment near Shinsaibashi, we made our way to Slices – a Canadian pizza joint that Brad promised was quite tasty. He was right.

Meghan and my hunger levels have been uncontrollable since we got off the bikes and into Osaka. It’s quite strange. While cycling, we could eat only a couple rice balls and cup noodle in one day, all while cycling almost 80km, and be satisfied. Now, with very little physical activity, we found ourselves almost constantly hungry. Our dinner at Slices saw that hunger reach a disasterous peak. Not only did we both have main dishes, but after we had finished, we ordered a huge pizza slice each! Needless to say, it proved to be too much food but, due to our extreme hunger of the past several days, we inhaled the pizza and, finally, after what seemed like 2 days of constant hunger, we were full. Very full. Thank you Slices. I can now go back to being a human being with a regular appetite.

Ten years ago today Christophe and I went on our first official date and had our first kiss (in fact my first kiss ever). Its weird to think that we have been together for so long. We have both changed so much since that date, but for whatever reason we have changed in a complimentary way and we still seem pretty happy as a pair.

To start the day of right we wandered around the immediate area until we had located a delicious looking bakery, purchased some baked goods, and bought a bottle of champagne and OJ for mimosas. Back at the apartment we enjoyed our prizes and told Liam about our first date ten years ago. Sadly he couldn’t join in the mimosas – something about “having a job”.

After a bit we decided to stroll around the Tennonji area, doing some window shopping and people watching. Along the way we located a very cute new hoody for me – fall seems to be in full swing and my collection of sleeveless cycling tops doesn’t seem to be quite cutting it anymore.

Once we got hungry we began perusing the local restaurants and settled on an Italian place where we enjoyed risotto. After our late lunch we set off in search of a wine and cheese shop, but after an hour of no luck settled on Yellowtail and Ritz crackers from a local convenience store. Undeterred we headed back to the apartment where we enjoyed our wine while watching the sunset from the porch. After an hour or so Hiromi came home, joining us for the second bottle of wine. By the time we were done with that Liam was home, so we headed out to a surf bar for burger and beers. Actually I had an amazing shrimp and avocado sandwich.

A low key day, but perfect.

We only realized about half way through packing up the tent that this, most likely, was the last time we would pack up the tent before heading back to the mother country. A single, perfect tear later, we were on our way to the ferry terminal to catch our 10:30-ish ferry to Osaka. The ferry trip was rather uneventful. We glided between the coasts of Shikoku and Honshu – through the Seto Inland Sea – until we made it to our Kobe destination.

Then began 30 kilometers, which took almost three hours, of lights, lights and more lights. We pedalled quickly – never really getting below 25kph – despite the stop and go. We followed what felt like a full days ride on route 2 with a series of dizzying lefts and rights to almost get to our destination. With the sun down and the store fronts lit, we found ourselves close, but not quite there. We stopped to grab a much needed bite and ponder our options.

Both our hosts were working and therefore unavailable, the directions I had mapped out for us using Google Maps had turned out to be horribly inaccurate, and the level of detail on our map left much to be desired. Inhaling our rice balls, we thought about our options. Then, I remembered the glorious omnipresence of unlocked wireless signals in large cities. I whipped out the Ipod Touch, quickly found our location and had us, beaming, at the apartment in no time. We grabbed a bit more food and enjoyed it on their wonderful balcony.

Our hosts, friends from Hokkaido Liam and Hiromi who had moved to Osaka about a year ago, returned from work and we headed out to grab a second, more filling dinner. The choice for the restaurant was a tough one. We were presented with a choice – the restaurant with the drunken pig theme, or the restaurant with the dancing baby strippers (Don’t worry, the babies were not real. They were automated sculptures modeled after the famous 1990s piece of internet real estate known as the “3D Dancing Baby”). We went with the drunken pig and enjoyed many a fried thing on a stick.

The holding pattern continued. We woke up, packed the tent, and headed into MacDonald’s to steal electricity and eat breakfast.

This trip has been about riding, seeing Japan and importantly sharing those experiences through these daily posts. Never having before kept a diary, it has been an interesting experience to reflect back on each day and find a narrative within theoccurrences . It also takes a lot of time. Everyday either Christophe or I spends an hour typing up the post, gathering photos onto the computer, sorting through the ones we want, and uploading it all online. Add to that the time it takes to add the map point and update the trip data. I am not complaining, as a member of a generation obsessed with recording everything electronically I am happy to have this amazing record of these experiences, I am simply pointing out that it takes a lot of time. Often we put off these tasks and then find ourselves faced with a mountain of blog updating that can take the better part of an afternoon (see our 4 hour stint atMacDonald’s yesterday). With all this blogging to be done, my emails have been piling up. The immediately pressing ones (contact with people we are meeting, credit card issues) I reply to, but the general well wishes andcorrespondences have been falling by the wayside. This morning I decided it was time to tackle them all and catch back up.

Three and a half hours later, we left MacDonald’s.

By now it was 12:30, so we decided to head for a park golf course on our map, looking for food on the way. Park golf, by the way, is kind of like mini golf on steroids. The ball and club are bigger, the distances to the hole longer, and take out all the plastic animals and windmills. On the way we stopped at a 100yen ($1) kaiten-sushi (conveyor belt sushi) joint. Considering each of the dishes were only a dollar it was pretty darn good. Plus Christophe and I are both currently reading “The Sushi Economy” (we ran out of books so we are sharing the last one) by Sasha Issenberg, which has left us both seriously craving raw fish on rice.

After a delicious feast of sushi (totally only $12) we headed on to the park golf course. Sadly, when we arrived it turned out to be a real golf course (stupid map written in Japanese) so we putzed around a local mall, picked up some snacks for the ferry tomorrow, and headed back to our stomping ground by the river.

We grabbed showers at an internet cafe – well a manga kissaten, which has internet, video games, comic books, pool tables, darts, free drinks… as Christophe put it, a really dorky version of a sports club where you pay in 15 minutes blocks. Then we went back into theMacDonald’s (lord knows what that staff must think of Americans now), ordered up a shake each and plugged in to watch a couple episodes of Next Generation while we waited for it to get dark.

It was another dinner of cup noodle, this time accompanied with ume-shu (a sweet, plum wine), down by the river. Then we set up the tent, crawled inside, and fell peacefully to sleep.