12 November 2023
Grey wedding day of not much going on
Sumiyoshi Taisha Osaka
Rest day with no plan. The 2nd of this trip, the first one was day 3 in Tokyo when I went to a park.
Are you ready for a grey day for a walk through the poor areas of Osaka? If so then buckle up.
Before all that, I went to Namba JR station to exchange my voucher for a train pass and activate it. No. You cannot do that at Namba station, why? The machines have the passport reader, there is a manned ticket counter, but no, due to some ancient belief system I must go to Osaka station. So I paid to go on the subway to get a ticket I had paid for. Some things in Japan are really quite stupid.
Next, I decided to not even go on a train today, as tomorrow I will go on a LOT of trains for many hours, if things go to plan. So instead I headed south, a journey which went through many poor areas, past many abandoned covered shopping streets, and ended up at the main Shinto Shrine in Osaka.
This is a live music venue, but there is no show on tonight. I guess they are lining up to buy a ticket, probably for a concert in a completely different city, because some archaic tradition stipulates that in order to see BIG BOY PANTS MAN in Wakayama you must buy a ticket in person from a venue in Osaka at 9:40 on a Sunday morning 17 days before the show.
My journey south, was largely like this. There were homeless shelters and gatherings of people with various horrible disabilities.
Graffiti too, this guy is the devil.
Strangely, the vending machines were less likely to be drinks, and more likely to be frozen food.
Each station I went past, 4 I think, had its own covered shopping street, the first 3 were almost completely abandoned.
The last one very near the shrine had a bit more going on, mostly fish related.
Over the road from the shrine is a garden of sorts. Not Japan's best effort.
Although the trees were nice enough.
Time for some shrine, allow me to google - One of Japan's most renowned shrines, Sumiyoshi Taisha is the head of approximately 2300 Sumiyoshi shrines throughout Japan. Out the front people are selling chocolate coated marshmallows and fake antiques.
They did not trust their arch bridge architect, so it is reinforced with a lot of concrete.
There were a lot of people playing dress ups inside. Every building had a gold thing in front of it for instagram opportunities.
Exactly like this. I asked to sit with them but they pretended to not understand English.
Instead I crashed a wedding.
They fled as fast as they could.
Believe it or not, these flags all around the shrine are advertising a local tyre store, buy 3 tyres get the 4th free.
And for my final pic, some kind of plastic coated everything 'shop', which I think is selling political opinions. That is all for my rest day, tonight I will go somewhere colourful to balance out the grey day.