I'm not sure if I've mentioned Zachary on here yet, but he's a friend I met in a McDonald's almost a month ago now and have been hanging out rather routinely with ever since. He's sort of connected me to his friend group at large, mainly through a Pokemon GO group chat on LINE, so pretty often when one of us has a plan to do something fun at least a few of the others will end up joining in.
Anyway, last Friday evening's trip to Osaka was born out of me stumbling over a "Watch It Again!" recommendation on YouTube. It was a thumbnail for a video for Uncle Rikuro's Cheesecakes, a sweet that went viral almost three years ago due to the fact it's a super fluffy and jiggly cheesecake.
"Huh," I murmured. "I wonder where that shop is."
Well, as luck would have it, it's not only in Osaka (a mere hour away from me by transit), but literally inside Osaka Station. So, suddenly in the mood for cheesecake, I hopped on the Pokemon GO group chat.
"Anyone up for going to Osaka this Friday after classes to get some cheesecake from this cool place in Osaka Station?" I linked the video for others to see.
Zachary answered right away. "I'm up for it." He and I share a class on Wednesdays and Fridays, which also just so happens to be our last class on Fridays, so it's pretty easy for us to hang out together then. We've made a couple of trips to a local multi-floor thrift store, the local two-story SEGA arcade, and now Osaka too because of this fact. "I'll reach out to a couple friends in other chats too and see if they're interested."
A couple minutes later, he asked, "Wait, how far away from the Umeda Sky Building is Osaka Station?"
A quick Maps search showed it's only about half a kilometer. When I let him know this, he got really excited. "We have to go there, too. That place sounds amazing."
"I'm up for it," I assured him, despite having no idea what the Umeda Sky Building is. A quick Google search told me it's the tallest building in Osaka, with an outdoors rooftop observation deck. It's not nearly as tall as the Tokyo Skytree, which I visited in January, but it's pretty amazing all the same.
And a few minutes later, he informed the group, "Guys! The Osaka Pokemon Center is in the station too!"
Welp, it looked like the evening was all planned for us now. Unfortunately, as it turned out, everyone in the Pokemon GO group chat had later classes that evening, but Zachary's friend Isobel said she could come. So the three of us made our way to Osaka Friday afternoon after class, rode up thirteen floors' worth of escalators to the Pokemon Center, and enjoyed looking around at all the plushies and toys and stuff there. Then, we walked over to the Umeda Sky Building and got in a line to get in an elevator that would take us to buy tickets to ride an escalator up the last few floors.
We stood in that first line for 45 minutes.
On the bright side, Zach and I were able to trade several Pokemon on Pokemon GO in the interim, and he was kind enough to hold my backpack for a bit (since I don't have a dorm and my homestay was out of the way, I had to carry mine all day, while he and Isobel dumped theirs off at the dorms before meeting me at the station. Since I had a bus pass, I took the bus there to save my knees as much as possible). But still, the wait was ridiculous.
Once we got out of that line, I thought it was time for the elevators, but no. We got into a smaller line that was waiting for the elevators.
Finally, after another fifteen minutes, we were in the elevators up to the 39th floor. From there, we each bought a ticket for ¥1500 (think $13.50, basically, at the current exchange rate which keeps skewing more and more in the dollar's favor by every week) and took the escalator up to the 42nd floor.
The view was... I don't want to exaggerate, but it was extraordinary. The wraparound windows revealed the by-now-night-shrouded city of Osaka glittering as far as the eye could see.
And then Isobel spotted the staircase up to the rooftop.
We all but sprinted up the stairs onto the roof. The roof in and of itself was a really cool space--there were black lights that caused the ground to glow like a starry sky, making it easy to see where the path was. Of course, a side effect of this was that everything white glowed. Zach was suddenly wearing glowing blue shoes--"I have Skechers! Yay!" he joked. My polka-dotted sweater was now gleaming all over the place.
But the view.
Wow.
I can't get my photos to my computer very easily at the moment (it's a long story), but I'll definitely post some of them here at some point, even if not till this summer. If you've been keeping up with my Facebook story, you saw some of them there. I also have a video of two trains crossing a huge bridge into Osaka in the dark.
The whole view was beautiful, and for whatever reason, the loudspeakers were quietly playing English pop songs. I sang along with a couple that I recognized, just for fun. Isobel spotted an area where couples were placing heart-shaped locks bearing their initials, high in the sky. We figured out that the gift shop sold the locks just for this purpose.
"Humans and our ridiculously intricate customs," Isobel observed.
As most people who know me well can attest to, one of my lesser-known talents is the ability to randomly spout deeper-than-it-needs-to-be nonsense off the top of my head sometimes when the moment calls for it. This, apparently, was one of those times.
"What would be the point of human existence if we didn't have our ridiculously intricate customs?" I asked quietly, leaning against the railing and surveying the starry-sky-like city around us.
Isobel fell silent for a moment. "Valid point," she agreed finally, emphatically, though with a bit stronger of language.
We finally headed down a bit later. Zach and I ended up at the tail end of a group that was ushered onto a long escalator down to the 37th floor that was encased in a wraparound window. When we got to the bottom, the escalator was empty, making for a perfect photo op. Isobel joined us in the line for the elevators down a few minutes later, and then we stood in that line for about twenty minutes.
"I don't see any stairs anywhere," I murmured. "What do we do if the building catches fire?"
"We die," Isobel offered helpfully.
"Or we could bust a window and jump out," Zach observed.
"And die," I muttered with a shudder.
"You either die or you die," Isobel shrugged.
"GUESS I'LL DIE," Zach, me, and several other foreign students/tourists mixed throughout the crowd replied in unison, striking the now-iconic meme's pose.
We finally made it back down to the ground level. In the basement of the building was an area designed to look like an outdoors restaurant district of Japan's past (unfortunately I was too tired and hungry to remember to take photos). We found an inexpensive pasta place there and enjoyed a really good dinner before heading back to Osaka Station to find our cheesecake.
Despite the fact that it was after 8 PM at this point, there was a line over twenty people long at Uncle Rikuro's. Thankfully, it was quick-moving, and while we waited, Zach and I got to watch the cheesecakes being made through a window. We each bought a hot-and-fluffy cheesecake fresh from the oven (for only ¥695, no less), and then it was time to head home for the night.
We all three took the train back to Kyobashi (a fairly big hub station that connects the JR lines and the Keihan line--a long story, that), but from there, Zach and Isobel headed back to Hirakatashi on a Keihan train, while I got on another JR line to the station nearest my homestay. I actually ended up in a women's-only car, and despite the fact that I've never once felt in any way endangered during my time here, I have to admit that I appreciated that car's existence. Going by the fact it was pretty crowded, I'm guessing the many other women inside it agreed with me.
The trip home was uneventful. I got on a bus at the train station, walked the rest of the way from the bus stop to my homestay, and delivered the still-warm cheesecake to my host mother to be refrigerated and eaten for dessert the next day.
And let me tell you, when we finally did eat it: it was a really dang good cheesecake.
"Good recommendation," Zach texted me Friday night when he tried his. "Very fluffy. Not too sweet."
So, even though the Umeda Sky Building ended up stealing the night overall, my initial idea to go try some jiggly cheesecake still proved meritorious in and of itself.
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