Suita campus and the Japanese

This morning a person from Canada came with the idea to explore the Suita campus of the university. With help of a map we (me with two other people) started walking towards the campus. It took about 75 minutes to get there. When we finally arrived we looked annoyed to the main gate, closed….. It seemed that they celebrate the autumn today (秋分の日), so the university was closed, stupid us We went on further to the monorail station. We didn’t see any gate there, so we entered the campus.
We just walked around a bit, since we couldn’t access any buildings. Some pictures of the area can be found on Flickr soon!

The temperature today is about 31 degrees celsius, too hot to walk for a few hours. So we went to kitasenri to buy some juice. We didn’t want to walk back again, so we took the train to minamisenri, a station 15 minutes from my dormitory.
But first we sat down at kitasenri for a while. Some kid stared at us, probably thinking: “look mammy, aliens!”. A man walked by and picked up some dirt from the ground and put it in the garbage-bin, that’s normal behaviour here, the younger people however seem to be more like westerns.

That evening I went to the supermarket to buy some spaghetti. I also bought some “mini-pizza’s”, cookies with a lot of spices. In the Netherlands you can buy something similar, but there’s more stuff on the Japanese version of this cookie. Really tasty.
On the way back I saw some guy blocking the road. Later I saw he was an employee of the gas station letting one of his customers out on the road. He bowed to say “thank you for your patience” to the waiting cars while his customer drove away.

Other remarkable things are that bicycles ride on the sidewalk, not on the road. Special roads for bikes are very rare. So you always have to pay attention to let bikes pass, most of the people even bow with their head if you clearly show that you get out of the way. I noticed the same behaviour in shops when I let people pass, they’ll even say “sumimasen” (sorry / excuse me).

It looks like Japanese people actually care about their environment. At least more than people in other countries where I have been.

Tomorrow I’m probably going to Osaka-city, even bigger, more shops, more neon, more… who knows. Ow and by the way, for the people interested in Kyoto, it’s just 45 mins by train.