Day Nine

3rd January 2007

Today we had a long drive from Wakayama back to Osaka so we could meet Mr Izuka the following day. Hideo was kind enough to drive us there even though it was peak hour and it was going to be a 2 and half hour drive. We finally got there! The rest of our teaching group was already there so we met up with them and decided to head into the city of Osaka by train. The others had only just arrived in Japan so they were very excited to hear all about our adventure so far. We took them to the first restaurant that we ate in when we first arrived. I ordered the same meal as the previous time which was curried noodles. Delicious! After tea we had a little look around at the night life which was still buzzing by the way and then decided to catch the train back to the hotel. Well this was an adventure as we got on the wrong train. When we finally realised that none of surroundings looked familiar we became a little concerned. We asked the conductor and he told us that we were heading in the wrong direction and that we needed to go back to where we came from and start again. This was ok – well so we though…… when we tried to go back to where we came from we soon realised that the trains had finished for the night and that we were stuck in the middle of no where with no idea of how to get back! Lucky I was with Steve and a big group of people or else I probably would have been in tears. A taxi was the only way to go. Trying to find one was difficult but then we finally did. You think it would have been smooth sailing from there……we told the taxi where to go but they had no idea what we were saying. We spent about 30minutes explaining to the taxi drivers where we wanted to go. This was a nightmare but we somehow eventually got through to them. So in we hopped in 2 taxis because there so many of us back to our hotel. We were about 20 minutes out of the way. We eventually arrived back at our hotel but each taxi bill came to $60 – a very expensive mistake. Oops! At least we could all laugh about it.