Today was not a very exciting day. We checked out of our hotel and thanked the staff for all their assistance. They were really helpful, they spoke English very well and helped us overcome the language barrier quite a few times, pointed out where we could buy sim cards, booked our taxi to the airport at a discounted rate and even walked over to the family mart with us to help us organise our train tickets all with a really friendly and happy attitude! I would highly recommend this hotel if not just for them. It was a little sad to be leaving, I’ve really enjoyed Taiwan, but we were also excited to be heading to Japan next!
We got to the airport early and had to wait for the JetStar desk to open, but this worked out well because a massive queue formed behind us so were ahead of that. Getting through the airport was fairly easy for a change and the flight was pretty smooth.
When we arrived in Japan and got through the airport, we organised our JR passes. We all had the tickets we needed to exchange for the passes except Rob, but Amy was able to get all that sorted at the JR ticketing office. I also thought I would take some time to setup my Japanese sim card just in case we needed some internet to get to the hotel.
From there we got on the train and made our way toward the hotel. The train was pretty quick, but there was an accident on the train line that caused us some delays. This was odd for us because our experience so far with the trains in Japan have been flawless. Perhaps Osaka didn’t have the same reputation as Tokyo or we just experienced a very rare thing! The train we were on went express to Osaka-Abenobashi station which was not our final destination, but then there was an announcement in Japanese that we didn’t understand, so we stayed on the train but then it went back the way we came! This train was an express service so even though we didn’t realise at the time, we passed a lot of stations! We got off at the first station we could and changed trains, but this one stopped all stations. In the end we got to our hotel ok, just a little later than usual but that didn’t bother us. We checked in and went out to explore Osaka. We ended up going to an arcade.