Talking about my upcoming trip to Osaka and beyond! Also reflecting on past trips to Japan.
Hey guys, welcome to this episode of the TGE Travel Chronicles. I know it was missing for a little bit, real life got in the way a little bit, but that's all right, I'm back in action. I want to talk about my upcoming trip to Osaka, going to do that in January. I've been to Osaka before, a few times, but I'm taking a group of friends that have never been there, and showing them the ropes around Japan, which is absolutely amazing country. I love Japan very much. I love the people, the culture, just how clean everything is, there's no garbage anywhere. The food is phenomenal. You can think of the best Japanese restaurant in your town or city, and five times better than that. The food there is absolutely amazing. So, taking my friends out to Osaka, which, a lot of people... it's kind of a second city against Tokyo. A lot of people, you know, when they think of Japan, they think of Tokyo, but Osaka is a great city in its own right. It has lots of touristy sites. It's got an Osaka Castle there, which is absolutely amazing sight to see, completely rebuilt. I think, back in the seventies or eighties, they rebuilt it with concrete and they threw an elevator in there, which is nice, but... Also close to Osaka is Kyoto.
Kyoto is the old capital of Japan, and they still have the old Imperial palace out in Kyoto, which is, depending upon if you take the Shinkansen or the local trains. The local trains can take about an hour to get there from Osaka, or the Shinkansen takes, I believe, 20-ish minutes, 15, 20 minutes to get out to Kyoto. I really haven't been to Kyoto a lot. I did overnight there once, couple of years ago, and checked out the Imperial palace grounds, which was great, but the last time I went was in 2015, 2016, and that trip, I was with my family. And that trip, funny story, that trip did not go very well, as planned, because it was towards the tail end of the year.
It was in September, and I was top tier in three elite programs at that time. I was top tier elite with Marriott, with Starwood, and Hyatt at that time. And Starwood and Hyatt, their elite stays were based on either nights or stays. So, you could have, say, five nights, five nights counts as one stay. So, I know for a platinum, back then, was either 25 stays or 50 nights. So, if you had one night, one stay, that counts as a stay. But, if you did multiple nights at a hotel on different reservations, that still counted as one stay, but if you hop back and forth between different hotels... say, if you're in one city and you go one hotel one night, one hotel the next night, back and forth, that's a stay. So, one stay, one stay, one stay, one stay. And of course it was that time of year where I was a little short on night credit, and decided "Hey, let's go hotel hopping in Japan because I'm drawing night credit. This is going to work out. It's going to be great."
No, it did not work out because every time we hotel hopped, literally, it was on the complete opposite side of town in Osaka. And then, same thing when we did it in Tokyo. And literally, from the time it takes to pack everything up, hop on the public transit, get over to the other side of town, check in, unpack, I'm already burning a couple of hours. So, when we visited Kyoto, by the time we got on the train to get out there, it was already 2:00, 3:00 in the afternoon, and we burnt the whole day because we're hotel hopping. So, I don't recommend doing that, even though now, the hotel programs, at least I know Hyatt, and then now the merged Marriott program, everything's based on nights, no more stays. So, no more hotel hopping for me, thank God. Anyway, so Kyoto is a wonderful city to check out and hang out at.
Also, I'll be taking my friends out to Hiroshima, and Hiroshima, obviously, is synonymous with, you know, one of the cities that got hit with the atomic bomb. And when I went there, I've only been there once, and that was back in... it was 2012. So, I went in 2012, with my boy Mike, and we did a big Japan tour. It was five days where we did, you know, Tokyo, took the bullet train down, spent the night in Kyoto, spent the night in Osaka. And then from Osaka, we went out to Hiroshima. And it was funny because that trip... My boy Mike, he's a real big fan of collecting stuff from the Hard Rock Café, and he has to personally be at the Hard Rock Café in order to collect his items. If someone were to, say, visit Vienna, got him something from the Hard Rock in Vienna, brought back, he wouldn't accept it. It's a badge of honor for him to actually go to the place to retrieve the item, to show that he was actually there. So, you know, we did lots of research, and I'm like, "Oh hey, there's a Hard Rock in Fukuoka, there's a Hard Rock here, there's a Hard Rock there."
And it was real funny because when we went to Hiroshima, we were kind of done early, and I kind of looked up the train schedule. I'm like, "Hey, we can actually hook it out to Fukuoka, and there's a Hard Rock out there." And he's like, "Oh sweet, let's go." So, we went to Fukuoka, just to go to the Hard Rock. So, we take the public transit from the Shinkansen station Fukuoka, go to the Hard Rock, and it was little. It wasn't really late, late, it was like 7:00, 8:00 at night around then. And so I'm like, "Huh, I wonder when the last train is." And so, of course I, you know, was on my phone, pull up the train schedule, and I kind of looked and I'm like, "The last train's in a half hour." And of course we're in Fukuoka, we're on the other side of city from the main train station, and I'm like, "Mike, we have to go. You need to grab your stuff and we need to go." And I thought, for sure, we were going to miss the last train out of town, back to our hotel in Osaka. And we really were literally running through the main train station, went and got seat assignments, and literally made the last train out of town, with two minutes left.
And the train from Fukuoka starts there, ends up in Osaka, and it was nice, but come to find out that the Shinkansen, of course they're not 24 hour operations, they got to do maintenance, so usually, everything kind of winds down around midnight, 1:00 AM, so just keep that in mind. The other thing, too, is that if you miss the last train of the night, there's lots of capsule hotels that are usually by the main train station that you can get a room, a capsule, for pretty cheap. Or usually, a lot of the businessmen that missed their last trains that night, they usually just go hang out at the local cyber cafe or bar, and just kind of just hang out there until the next morning, till the first train leaves, so kind of interesting.
Anyway, back to Hiroshima. It was really emotional for me because when you go through town, or you go through any major cities, you notice, you know, there's older buildings, older structures, you know, you see history. The closer and closer that the train got in town, you can tell the buildings got newer and newer and newer and newer, and that was really surreal for me because it's like, okay, there's nothing left that was from before the bomb went off back in the forties. And it was just really, just, sad to just roll through town and just see the history slowly disappearing away, to this brand new city, pretty much. And it was just really, really emotional. And when you go to where the bomb was dropped at, and you see the old opera house that was still standing, that's pretty much just a metal shell of itself, and the memorial park and the museum, it's really emotional, and it's really just eye-opening, how terrible that day was, how terrible the war was, when the bomb went off there. And it's beyond words, just how impactful it is. I can't describe it to you, how... You have to be there to actually experience it and experience the feelings that I felt. It was really, really, just, emotionally sad.
Anyway, but just outside of Hiroshima, if you take the local train to Hiroshima, there is a... Man, it is slipping my mind right now. There's a... God, I am pretty sure I'm going to mispronounce this name, but I'm going to try to pull it up real quick. Ah, that's right. So, if you take the train outside, there's a torii gate, which looks like it's floating on water. It's actually built... If it's the high tide, it looks like it's floating on the water. If it's low tide, it's all mud lots out there. It's the Miyajima shrine out... it's on an island, and it's a really cool spot to check out because that torii gate is actually the model, based upon the torii gate that's at Epcot in Walt Disney World, for the Japan pavilion. I know, kind of a weird fact, I'm a big Disney nerd, so I thought it's kind of cool, but it's also awesome when you actually go out there. You're like, "Oh, I'm actually at the actual site of the actual torii gate that's based upon that." I thought that was kind of cool. But Miyajima, it's actually a really, really cool spot to check out because, supposedly, the whole island is sacred, and no one passes away on the island. They will take anyone that's ill or dying off the island, in order to preserve the the sacrecy of the island. And I thought that was pretty cool.
But, I'm really forward to this trip because I haven't been to Nara yet, and I was thinking about checking that out. I don't know if anyone's been there before, give me some advice because there's a park there where there's deer, protected deer in this park, and they supposedly bow to you before you feed them. And I'm like, "Oh wow, that's pretty cool." I would like to go check that out and see that too. Also, for all the big theme park nerds... because I'm a big Disney nerd, for those of you that don't know, Universal Studios Japan is out there. I've been to the CityWalk before and ate. Surprisingly, went to the CityWalk, ate at a sushi restaurant at CityWalk, and I thought, "Oh, you know it's going to be overpriced. It's going to be pretty touristy and the food's not going to be that great." And it was actually pretty decent prices, great, amazing food, and I was just blown away. I was like, "Wow, this is pretty amazing." So, that's definitely a spot to keep in mind.
Oh that's right, I forgot. I totally forgot about Kyoto. Going back to Kyoto, sorry, I'm kind of all over the place tonight. But with Kyoto, there is also Japanese gardens and a golden temple to go see and check out, and I thought that was pretty cool. And there's also a shrine area where it looks like these red poles, and you're walking along this path, and I have never done that before, at least, so I think this trip, coming up in January, is going to be amazing and awesome for everyone because I've been there a couple of times, so I kind of know a little bit what to do. but also there's going to be lots of stuff that I've never done before, and I think it's going to be, just, an amazingly great time. So yeah, that's something to look forward to. So, if you got advice or tips about Osaka or anything else around, just hit me up, let me know. Thank you so much for listening to this episode today. Have a great day.