Day 4: Hirakata City Hall

Day 4: Hirakata City Hall

Tuesday, August 26

All international students are required to have a valid Resident Card with their most recent address indicated on the reverse side. When you arrive to Japan, you are given your card at the airport, but it does not yet contain your address data. In order to update your information and officially register within your city, you need to head to the local city hall.

So, since Tuesday turned out to be a free day for me and a few of my dorm friends, we decided to head over to Hirakata City to get our cards signed. We hopped on the Keihan bus, which so happens to stop right at our seminar house, so we were quickly on our way.

Picture I took on the bus. This was the closest I was able to get to the front of the bus to take a picture of the tiny Ace pin on the board.

The bus fare was 230 yen, and the announcement system in the bus was great: everything was clear, all stops were loudly announced and the key ones were also repeated in English. We were told many times that the current prime minister of Japan is really going out of his way to make Japan more accessible to foreigners, and I suppose this might be one of the recent improvements.

As always, the morning was rather gloomy, so everything looked really grey. When we got off the bus, we realized we had no idea where the City Hall was located. Somehow, they failed to give us something as important as directions on the bloody orientation session, so we kind of looked around aimlessly for a little while. People tried looking up a map, but the internet was too slow, so in the end I ended up asking the bus station attendant where we should go.

However, after going around the station as we were told, we still had no idea how to get to the damned place. I tried asking people on the street and a few shop attendants for help, but none knew what “City Hall” even meant. After a while, a local woman approached us because she noticed how helpless we looked and offered help in English! We quickly understood where to go and were once again on our way.

A sign on the pedestrian walkway towards the City Hall.

I won’t go into detail to describe how long it took us to find the right office within the City Hall building, but once we did we were brought to a ticket machine, which gave us a number indicating our position in line and were told to wait for it to be announced or shown on the screen.

Finally, I sat down to fill out the necessary forms, which went rather awfully since I had no idea what the address of our seminar house was (somehow, the notion that “Kansai Gaidai Seminar House 4" was no a valid address didn’t cross my mind until it was pointed out to me XD). I don’t even know what I’d do then if my friend wasn’t sitting right next to me with the university booklet, which contained the address I needed. Later, I found out that the only reason my simple-address tactic didn’t work was because the assistant I got was a trainee, so, he had no idea Kansai students were frequent “visitors” to the city hall and didn’t know they had all the address info for us already. Apparently, none of my other friends had to provide the actual address!

After that awkward experience, we were finally done with the city registration and were on our way back to the Hirakata station. We had hoped to get some food on the way back, but since more students joined our group, we took way too long to agree on something and I just ended up going back with two of my friends that also needed to be back on campus in time for other events.

You guessed it, another daily meal! Chicken Katsu set with an extra of a spongeckae-roll with strawberry filing.

We ended up going to the dining hall, but I was more than happy with the decision, because the food was once again great and really cheap.

After eating, we split up to go do our own things. I went to turn in a copy of my updated resident card along with the three forms required for Kansai registration: insurance verification form, conduct agreement and a privacy consent form.

The way home as seen outside the Kansai gate.

With that done, I was free to go back home, but I decided it could be interesting to walk around near my seminar house to see what some of the nicer Japanese homes looked like.

Inspired by the pretty house I saw on the way back.

Approaching the seminar house (brick building on the left), soon to turn left at the crossing to look at the houses.

Every house has a garden, even if a completely tiny one!

After, I stumbled upon a weird tiny park with mildly creepy plastic animals.

Lots of flowers and fruit trees, though!

After the short detour (and endless chasing of the butterfly you can’t even see in the second picture above), I went straight to Sanko to do some food shopping. Take a look at the day’s haul:

Vegetable chips, melon bread, green tea, milk (which tastes great, btw), apple gummies, coffee drink, pokemon ramen, seaweed udon, peach jelly with pieces of peach inside, Fit’s grape-flavoured chewing gum (kind of mandatory after all the commercials), two different apples to compare, grapes, mysterious Chopper snack, two corn cheeto-like sticks, panda (cookies & cream) pocky and a dessert pudding! Phew, that’s a lot of stuff. Now I’m hungry.

Sounds like I good note to end the day on, right? Nope, there’s more! The evening of the same day, my friends and I went to a local soba/udon restaurant based on the recommendation we saw on the whiteboard in our seminar house. My roommate, Aya, went along with us, and I am really glad than she did, because the English menu was really limited and the Japanese menu a bit too difficult to understand. She was nice enough to help us with finding something to order.

You can see the owner in the right picture!

Unfortunately, the “bar” area pictured above was already occupied, so we had to squeeze 6 people around a 4-person table, but we managed it somehow.

Egg and udon soup, feat. amazing grape soda.

The food was good and the owner was friendly and interested in where everybody came from. He also took pictures of us eating for their newly-made Facebook page, but I haven’t been able to find it.

Overall, this was a great day. I got all of my paperwork sorted out and had a fun time looking around Hirakata, walking around the nearby area and trying out some great Japanese food! This has definitely been one of the most eventful days so far, I might not have another one like this in a while.