Osaka - the friendliest city in Japan

We were not even in Osaka for 10 minutes, just looking for our hostel like confused westerners, when a small, friendly woman approached us and asked (in pretty good English, too) if she could help us find where we were going. She walked with us for about 5 or 10 minutes to our hostel. Being conditioned to be wary of strangers and automatically think that someone must have a hidden agenda if they go out of their own way to help us, we thought maybe she wanted money for a charity or maybe was going to lead us down a dark alley and murder us. However she left us at our hostel with a "good luck, and enjoy Osaka" and waved us a friendly goodbye. We have been informed that people in the kansai region, and Osaka in particular, are very outgoing and friendly, and our first impressions of Osaka and the first few people we have talked to have most definitely confirmed that. And we also thought that SURELY, this time, we would have a crappy small hostel room. No, it's amazing and even bigger than all the others. Ahhhh Osaka, we are in love. We also just had a quick wander around the streets and have decided we REALLY like the look of Osaka - our hostel is on a cute cobblestone pedestrian shopping mall, and the suburb (Fukushima (don't worry, we're not in THAT Fukushima) ) that we are in is a grungey, restaurant filled downtown district much like a cross between our favourite suburbs of Ueno and Koenji in Tokyo. Now we're just really sad that we're only here for 6 days. Anyway this was just a quick post to express my love for Osaka. Tonight we are going to a dinner party with Luci's brother Karl's friend Tomomi and a whole bunch of her friends. Will keep you all updated and I should also have some photos to upload soon. For now, enjoy some photos of amazing parfaits (I think we may actually write a separate blog post just about parfaits - like all things from the 80s, here, rather than fading into obscurity, it has become massively popular and exaggerated about 5 times. We have become slightly obsessed with eating parfaits here because they are so good - it's like 8 contradicting desserts all shoved together in a glass with cornflakes - there are always cornflakes. This place we went to in Kyoto last night served over 200 different kinds of parfait. Oh my goodness.)