You may have noticed that nothing new has been added to the YouTube channel in quite a long time, well that's all about to change! Here are 5 new videos! Yes! 5! Count 'em!
First of all lets start with some cultural stuff. A couple of days ago I went to the Nagoya Festival where there was lots of stalls and food on sticks. Most importantly though, there was a huge parade through town, which I took a couple of videos of. Due to having a shit battery in my camera I couldn't take the whole thing, but I got a few highlights. You can also follow me on twitter if you want pictures of it @Taurinensis.
But wait, I hear you exclaim! What the fuck does the Nagoya Festival have to do with Silent Bomber for Playstation 1? Well fucking nothing, obviously, but the reason that picture is there is because SURPRISE! NEW UNPLANNED PLAYTHROUGH! Me and my good buddy take up our futuristic bombing rigs and go crazy in sci-fi action game Silent Bomber! Enjoy!
There you go, 5 new videos, if that doesn't make you happy nothing will.
Well we've had the Resident Evil stuff, and we've had some ranting about shopping bags, now it's time to talk about the city of Osaka itself.
Well, to be honest with you, because of time constraints I didn't really get to see all that much of it, but what I did see I really liked. I actually felt quite at home in Osaka, I don't know if anyone would agree but to me it kind of felt like someone had taken London and Manchester, smashed them together and them cleaned them up so they looked all nice.
This view somehow reminded me of Manchester Piccadilly
But before I could really take in the city, I was on a subway train heading to an area that had a load of temples in it. It looked like a place that would usually be quite quiet, but we were fortunate enough to get there on what I think was a festival day, so the streets and temple areas were little with stalls selling all kinds of junk.
The owner was really expecting this stuff to sell?
It was a really nice, vibrant area with a really strong smell of incense coming from the temples as people lit them and said prayers and whatnot. There was also a really chill garden that you had to pay a couple of hundred yen to get inside, but it was a really nice escape from the festival crowds, and gave some much needed chill time after a day of walking around.
The whole thing was a really nice, chill start to the day that was going to turn into a hardcore shopping trip as we got on another subway to a place called Namba. I can't remember if I've mentioned it here, but there is a place near me called Osu Kannon, which is this enclosed little street area filled with shops and stuff. Namba was basically this on fucking steroids, it was huge and we basically spent the rest of the day there and still didn't get through all of it.
Near Namba is a place called Dotonbori, which fans of the Yakuza games might recognise since this was an area featured in Yakuza 2. It's basically more of the same thing, but they have this famous sign for the Glico company, which makes pocky and shit like that.
So the rest of the day was basically spent shopping, so I won't bore you with details of our shopping trip. That said, there was a funky little boat ride just near the sign in the above picture, and I recorded a couple of minutes of it before my cameras battery started to crap out, so have a gander at this video!
So about 20 minutes from my place there is this cool little area of Nagoya known as Osu. Osu on a normal day is a place full of shops and resturants and it tends to attract quite a few tourists, but yesterday, was the Osu summer festival!
What basically happens is there is a couple of events around Osu and metric shit tons of people gather to come see them and eat food out of stalls. It's a really good day out and it has an extremely fun atmosphere that I've never really felt at a big public event before. It's hard to describe but if anyone takes a holiday out here and has the chance, go to a festival, it's fuckin' good!
Anyway, the first thing I came across was a bunch of Taiko players.
It's almost impossible to miss these guys, the sound of these huge drums echoes through the whole of Osu and if you've ever seen people play Taiko before, it's fucking cool! I'll attach a video of these guys at the bottom of the post.
So after walking through the rest of Osu, which was largly business as usual, I reached this
Out here was a bunch of stalls selling various types of food and all for a super cheap price. So after picking up a hot dog we then moved on to to this...
This group of steel drum players were extremely fun to watch, but I felt rather sorry for them because just standing there to watch them in the extreme Japan heat was absolutely killer on me, I hate to think what they were feeling up there bashing away on those drums. But still it was a lot of fun and they were doing a good job of pleasing the crowd to the point where people were just casually dancing around. Also there was a dude running around with a flag of Trinidad and Tobago, so it was nice to see some cultural fusion. There will be another video of these guys at the bottom of the page.
The other big thing that I came across was a Samba Parade. It started just near where the steel drummers were and went through the entire shopping district.
There was plenty of people singing and dancing and there were even people in those cool looking Brazilian parade outfits, but it was almost impossible to get a good view of them at the start because there was just too many people. Instead of boring you with words, I'll post 2 videos of the parade. The first one will give you an idea of the turnout, and the second will be a better view of the parade itself.
