a lunatic in Osaka.

Travel is glorious and liberating and mind-blowing and inspiring and also the most painful thing ever.

I forgot, of course, how difficult it is to get from one place to another. It’s not just a matter of showing up on time. It’s a matter of figuring out what time you need to do to get the thing that gets you to the other thing that gets you there on time, and what you need to do before that, and where you have to leave keys and where to buy tickets and how long that takes and which airport/station/gate/platform the thing is leaving from and how FAR it is to that airport/station/gate/platform and where are the loos and will you need lunch and can you take a snack and FUCK IS THAT THE TIME and WHY IS GOOGLE MAPS NOT HELPING ME and WHY CAN’T I SPEAK THE LOCAL LANGUAGE OMG WHY AM I DOING THIS AT ALL.

Me, every time I go anywhere.

Then I arrive *somewhere* and have to spend an hour wandering in every direction that ISN’T the way to my Airbnb because GOOGLE MAPS IS USELESS and then I get to the (locked) door and spend another ten or twenty minutes scrolling through the host’s instructions re the keypad code and THEN I GET IN THE DOOR and it’s such a goddam relief and I have a beverage or two and all is forgotten.

I’ve heard women say similar things about childbirth.

And then I do it all again, some other time, somewhere else.

(also, apparently, like childbirth).

I’m reading a book at the moment that claims stress can be good for you – if, of course, you perceive it as such. And that you become less susceptible to the effects of stress the more you put yourself through it.

I guess I’m the exception to that rule because, if anything, I’m rapidly becoming less cool and definitely less competent and emphatically more agitated every time I have to get from place A to place C (place A to place B is usually ok).

And it’s only in hindsight that I realise Japan is probably the worst place for a lone, ageing, and slightly neurotic traveller like myself. Japan is wonderful, yes, and most people will help you (apart from the knob at Yūrakuchō Station who just snapped and pointed at the door) but it is mighty f*cking confusing. My fault for not re-learning Japanese (obviously I’ve forgotten everything from high school) and probably also my fault for just booking shit and ploughing blindly ahead.

Oh, I’m sure it is good for me. Better, at least, than mouldering in my Remuera shoebox while everyone else builds houses and pays mortgages and buys Teslas and bears children and has dinner parties and goes to the opera. Or the rugby, whatever.

But I digress.

Today I took myself to Dotonburi, which is just where you go when you go to Osaka. If you’re a tourist, anyway. I am not a tourist, and I avoid tourist stuff like I avoid men who don’t wear socks with sneakers, but I went because Dotonburi is also supposed to be famous for its street food, and I like food.

Lord, am I an idiot.

Food there may be, but it’s food for Instagramming, not enjoying. Overpriced and overbattered sea creatures, syrup-choked fruits on sticks, minute cubes of Kobe beef and odd things stuffed into cones or in sandwiches. I ate some very average sushi and tried to chew my way through half a dozen takoyaki (bits of tyre-like octopus thrown haphazardly into batter and drowned in cheap soy sauce) before saying fuck this and collecting up a bunch of tax-free junk food in Shinsaibashi and walking some two hours home (because the exercise made the trip worth it).

And, back in my nondescript and thoroughly un-touristy corner of Osaka, I found a delightful “mom-and-pop” udon restaurant on a street corner and paid $9.50 for a huge bowl of beef-and-egg on rice with udon soup on the side, cooked in front of me by the elderly owner, who then casually slurped down his own dinner over the same stove. And I felt better.