The Osaka night life

The next night, Lauren, Tina and I went to Osaka with this American girl who also lives in our apartment called Lexi. She loves Osaka and really loves the nightlife there and she was going to take us to some cool places in Osaka. We met up with Megumi in the afternoon in this cool Australian café and had a drink with her. It was good to catch up with her again. Then we had tea at this sushi train restaurant that cost 130yen ($1.30) for one plate of sushi. It was so cheap that I ended up having nine plates! I was so full in the end. It was delicious!

Then Lexi said she would take us to a host bar. Host bars are really popular in Osaka. On just about every street corner, there are young, trendy guys dressed in suits that are hosts and they prey on young, trendy girls (usually hostesses) to come into their bars.

When you enter a host bar, you pay around 2000yen ($20) for one hour and you get as many drinks and you want in that time. Young Japanese guys dressed nicely in suits come up and talk to you and this is all included in the cost. They are the hosts.

So you could imagine how embarrassed and awkward we felt when we had these young Japanese guys dressed in suits coming and talking to us. Not many of them knew how to speak in English, so it was a bit difficult to hold a conversation with them, but luckily, Lexi speaks Japanese really well so she did well at breaking the ice. I think they felt bad that they couldn't talk to us though. I wish I knew how to speak Japanese better! One of the guys was pretty good at speaking English. He was really funny too. He said, “Foreign girls are beautiful. They have a good body shape – like a statue!” I swear he had rehearsed that line before! It was classic! I have never heard that one before!

We left the host bar after our hour of drinks and Japanese/English conversation. It was very exhausting, but funny at the same time! We walked around for what seemed like hours before we finally decided on a club to dance in. We went to this club that didn’t have much atmosphere. We had one drink there and left straight away. We walked around for another couple of hours (so it seemed) until Lexi suggested we go to Jewel. This nightclub played trance music which wasn’t really Tina and Lauren’s type of music, but I was happy to go wherever because I just wanted to go SOMEWHERE rather than wondering around for another hour! So we finally decided to go into this club. It was really REALLY cool! We were all really glad that we had decided to go into this club.

You should have seen the way these people looked and dressed! It was a totally different atmosphere – so different to anywhere in Australia. It was just amazing! The guys all looked like Dragonball Z and the girls looked like Barbie dolls with really tanned skin that looked like they had sat in a solarium all day. The girls wore next to nothing, but they got away with it because they were all so thin and perfect looking.

The guys were extremely trendy with hair sticking out everywhere and they wore really trendy clothes that you would only get away with wearing in Japan. It was just a totally different experience being in there. I want to go back there very soon!


Tina and Lauren decided to leave at around 4am, but Lexi and I wanted to stay, so we danced on until around 5:30am and then Lexi walked me back to my hotel. It was such a good night and pretty much everything I had experienced that night was something I have never experienced before in my life! Do you ever get that funny feeling where you walk into a place and just think WOW! I have never seen ANYTHING like this before in my life! Where everything is so interesting and amazing and you can’t stop looking at the people and the places because it is just totally different to what you would ever expect or even imagine. Well that was how I felt that night! It was a really good feeling!