After two days of traveling and four flights from Bora Bora >Tahiti > Rarotonga > Auckland (good night sleep there) > Osaka, we safely landed last night in JAPAN! We also crossed the international dateline while flying to New Zealand and therefore unfortunately lost one day of travel (started in Rarotonga on day 14th and landed 4hours later in Auckland on day 15th)..

The difference between a tranquil South Pacific Island and busy, busy Osaka could barely be greater. Osaka feels huge and is huge with 17mio people living here. First thing we recognized is that space is precious in Japan’s big cities. The room we checked in has the size of Florian and the tiny, tiny bed is only suitable for a part of him.

Wandering through the extremely clean streets today we saw very interesting, creative shops and architecture, also saw many really handsome Japanese girls all over, dressed up perfectly in somehow quite crazy and again creative clothes combinations. Nice to watch. Also many Japanese wear masks in public. This asian surgical mask culture feels rather strange, but for them, of what we heard, the mask is so common as they believe to protect themselves from anything as pollen, cold season and bad air quality (and yes, there is quite a smog!). It even became a social etiquette to wear a mask in Japan when you feel sick as a courtesy to other.

In terms of outside temperatures we are now very close to current German degree Celsius. Hence, to warm up, we ate a delicious typical Ramen soup for lunch and later had a glimpse into Japanese huge entertainment stores with a lot of gambling and ofcourse – karaoke!