rain rain go away

The rainy season has hit Japan, seemingly a month late. I think Osaka hasn't been suffering too badly from what I hear, there were floods in Tokyo and so far I've hardly been caught in any severe downpours. Anyway, rain is rain and it's still annoying.

Jeremy and I were wondering what to do with ourselves today, we checked out 'the best of Kansai', a book I bought about a year ago, and it suggested the best thing to do on a rainy day is visit Panasonic Square, which shows how outdated the book is because we tried to go there once before and the security guard laughed and informed us it closed 6 years ago. So we weren't going to try that again.

Feeling stuck, we consulted our Kyoto 'Lonely Planet' which had lots of information on visiting temples and eating expensive cuisine, but nothing to do for entertainment on a rainy day.

There's always JJ Club, the multi-story arcade parlour with cheap rates and an abundance of games and other activities, if you don't mind getting very sweaty, but we were too tired for that.

Lucky for us a friend suggested we meet for a late lunch at one of the few Mexican restaurants, El Pancho in Shinsaibashi, so we jumped at the opportunity to do something on this overcast, but ultimately pretty dry day. I got my new glasses adjusted and Jeremy picked up his glasses. That's another story about a 25 minute optical dispenser (aLook in Shinsaibashi), honestly the fastest glasses I've ever bought. My eyesight is shit, and I usually need special lenses cut and polished, it usually takes about 2 weeks, but mine were ready in the promised 25 minutes. Jeremy's glasses took a few days for some reason, even though his eyesight is better than mine, maybe most Japanese people have crappy vision like me so the stronger lenses are more readily available.

Then we went shopping, looked at expensive sunglasses for Jeremy, baulked and didn't buy, and then saw 'Batman Begins'. So there you have it, we found something to do during rainy season. The same boring crap we would have done in our own countries.