Arriving In Japan

Since we're trying to make this trip as cheap as possible we flew Air Asia. The tickets were 13,395 baht per person from Bangkok to Osaka. Of course Air Asia being a budget airline we paid extra for luggage, food and seat selection, bringing the total cost to 16,750 baht. Still a better deal than the full service carriers.

We connected in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and the only thing worth mentioning about this is the LCCT international terminal doesn’t have much for dining. If you're coming through and think you might be hungry plan ahead, there’s not much waiting for you.

The flight arrived at Kansai airport around 10:30 PM and we caught the train into Osaka. To my ear all Japanese train station names sound the same and unless I see it written, I have a hard time understanding. The trains don’t have the Romanized name on a marquee as I was expecting so we had to keep asking people on the train if we were at our stop.

The turnstiles are a bit odd — there’s nothing stopping you from walking through them. Not understanding where to use the tickets, I walked though thinking "if they want me to stop, they'll put something in the way to stop me." The alarm went off and Zine ran my ticket for me.
We finally made it to the station and after a short walk were at the Mikado Hotel where I'd made reservations via hostleworld.com. Hostelworld must not have told Mikado to expect us and they were overbooked. The staff was very nice, called a hotel 100 yards away to inquire if they had a room and walked us over. The new place was called Raizon. It was nice enough and cost 3,780 yen per night for a room with two beds.