YuMDaP.net's blog

Phew... I don't even know where to start. First of all it was a very long trip. We started off in Hamburg at 8:30 am on July 10th. The train to Frankfurt took like 5 hours. From there we took a flight to Dubai which lasted just 7 hours. From there we catched our transfer flight to Osaka (12h!!!). Dubai, by the way, must be like the biggest shopping airport in the world. Someone told me you can even buy cars here.

Check-in and waiting in Frankfurt

Dubai duty-free and donut-break

Now the last time I was on a plane there were two on-board movies and some stupid radio program. On the second flight (to Osaka) every seat had a pretty big LCD-screen with a nice resolution and there was a selection of > 200 current movies plus TV programming. Every seat also had some kind of a gampad which you could use to play single- or multiplayer games against other people on the plane. So I could have left that book I bought for the flight at home .

robot transportation

was there a fire on the plane?

When we finally arrived in Osaka we were kindly received a representative of the Goethe-Institute Osaka who arranged for us to get to our accomodations. And this is where the culture-shock began already. The city of Osaka arranged for our quarters at hotel for truckers in the port of Osaka. This hotel never had guests exept long-distance truckers so having a group from Germany was a pretty new thing for them. The hospitality we experienced there was so overwhelming it was almost insane.

We met with two ladies working for the City of Oska PR (Public Relations). They just came along to do the translating because almost no one here speaks any English. When we arrived at the truckstop hotel we were asked to join a meeting with all personal involved in this hotel. The administrator, security, housekeeping... even the cook was there. After everyone was introduced to everyone they gave us a couple of maps. On these maps they (hand-)marked all regions of interest for us with different colors, annotated with German translations (they must have looked that up in a dictionary). Since no one there speaks any English they prepared notes with everything we could possibly want in German with Japanese translations to show the staff whenever we need something. Our rooms here are great, single-bed rooms with shower, toilet and air-conditioning and a nice harbour-view. And cheap as hell.

Finally some rest and relexation

Quick Update: Just got to the congress center, had breakfast and have internet now. The breakfast at our hotel was overwhelming. They waited us, which was completely uncustomary for this place. I was also told we are they first foreigners these people ever had contact to. Of course they tried to impress us by preparing a western breakfast. Not that we weren't happy about that but of course we would have loved some Japanese cuisine. The problem is: How could we tell them we want Japanese breakfast without insulting their efforts to prepare western breakfast for us. Well, crazy world this is..

Later
Matthias