Category: Travel

the hunt for a mcdonald’s in osaka

whbeebe

The exercise I flew to Osaka to support ended yesterday. So today, Friday, was a day to do catchup work in the hotel room and to walk about the city around the hotel. One of the tasks that my traveling partner and I wanted to do was to find a McDonald’s and get a Japanese-version of an American Big Mac. It was an irrational desire, what with all the other restaurants in the area, but bad habits die hard (as I probably will due to bad dietary decisions such as this one). After all the long hours, we really wanted a Big Mac.

So we started by querying our super sophisticated map applications on our super sophisticated smart phones (me with my iPhone 6s+, and he with his mere iPhone 6) because unlike other Japanese cities I’ve visited, there weren’t any obviously located that we could see anywhere we walked. Guess what? Me with Google Maps and him with Apple Maps could barely find a McDonald’s within the area. We did manage to find one close to our hotel. So we turned our trust over to GPS to guide us to that lone McDonald’s. As it turned out GPS and other tracking technologies on both were truly lacking, and it was as much guessing where the smartphones were trying to guide us as having true guidance from either device. We finally found that McDonald’s after a lot of walking, partly underground, and we placed our order.

I would up with a Teriyaki McBurger, my concession to being in Japan, while he got the Big Mac. I’m not exactly sure if mine qualified as a true teriyaki burger or not, but it was sure slathered in teriyaki sauce. What I can say with absolute certainty is that the fries were definitely McDonald’s fries, just like I’d get back anywhere in Orlando.

At least I wasn’t looking for Subway…

a night after work at the foodium

whbeebe

From before the sun rises until after the sun goes down, or fourteen hours, I’m at my job here in Japan. Because I get back to the hotel so late regular restaurants are closed, both convention franchise as well as local mom-and-pop businesses. So my Plan B for getting something for supper is to walk about two blocks to a 24-hour combined grocery and little restaurant called foodium. I don’t know if it’s a Japanese language idiom or not; the name sounds like something that would come straight out of the Valley. The foodium has become my one way of breaking the monotonous cycle of sleep-shower-breakfast-work-sleep. And it gives me an opportunity to walk about a bit as well, even if it is at night.

The interior is well lit and very modern, just about what you’d expect in an American supermarket. The panoramic should give some idea of one corner of the store. It’s packed full of modern packaged Japanese food items, a lot of it highly processed.

Some of the items have a western Christmas/Yuletide theme. The Japanese, for whatever reasons, are very much into Christmas. You can’t go anywhere without hearing western Christmas music being piped into stores and train stations.

The Japanese will even dress the part during Christmas, as the photo above illustrates. Japan is an interesting culture, one that combines aspects of theirs and ours in interesting and complex ways.

Cameras

The top photo was taken with an OM-D E-M10 and Panasonic 14mm pancake lens. The rest were taken with the iPhone 6s+. The camera in the iPhone is truly powerful with capabilities I’ve barely learned to tap. The ability to take panoramic photos, like the second, is so simple to do and the results are actually worth keeping. I wish Olympus were as easy to use making panoramics as the iPhone.

The E-M10 JPEG images were moved onto the iPad using OI.Share. All post processing was done on either the iPhone or the iPad using Snapseed.