pachinkoing

Yay! I'm in Japan... Still, I guess. But it feels like I'm in a
different Japan since I'm travelling around in places outside of Gifu.
I feel Gifu doesn't really count since the whole mysteriousness and
strangeness of it has already disappeared, which kinds sucks. But
getting out of the prefecture certainly feels like it's injecting new
life into a country I've now been in for over a year.

After meeting up with my brother in Osaka on Thursday night, we spent
the next few days getting lost in the city. I've decided that getting
lost in a city is probably one of my favourite things to do on a new
place, mainly because it seems to mainly consist of walking around
aimlessly, shopping and stopping to eat food. The only downside of
this was realizing how much cooler Osaka is than Gifu for shopping,
but not being able to buy anything, since I lack the money and also
don't want to lug around a bunch of crap as I travel around Japan.

One of the highlights of Osaka: pachinko-ing! Sure, it's essentially
Japanese pokies, and just involves you insetong money and twisting a
knob and holding of on position as balls fly out and drop onto random
holes, but still way more fun and entertaining than playing pokies and
just pulling a handle. We also played this variant pokies, which
involved exchanging money for tokens, and inserting the tokens in a
machine and watching them randomly fall into certain holes on a board.
We did find we were awesome at it too, and were winning quite a bit.
Until we realized we didn't know what we were suppsed to do to
exchange the tokens back into money, or exchange them for prizes. So
instead, we just kept playing until all the coins were gone.

Ah well, I guess that's not how the games supposed to work. Bit hey,
of took a year before I even touched a pachinko machine. I've got the
whole year to work out the 'how to actually win money' thing. One step
at a time!