Sauntering (experience and defense of)

We've been doing quite a bit of sauntering since we arrived in Japan. A large part of it has been waiting for trains, or check-in times, as we find ourselves with nothing to do, but little desire to spend money (there are only so many pastries one can eat in a given day...). The rest, however, has been purposeful sauntering (if we wanted to stretch things I would say that it sometimes borders on flaneuring) and we've managed to find some interesting areas along the way. Really that's one of my favorite activities in new places - to simply walk without a goal, or without the physical goal not necessarily dictating your path. Tonight we were walking around the Umeda area after checking on bus times for a weekend trip to Nagoya. Umeda is a big train hub - for JR, the subways and all of the "private" lines - and so we end up transferring through here a lot. Because it is so big, however, it's been hard to actually figure out what there is to do there. We've had some curious excursions there in the past couple of weeks (involving staircases with hidden entrances and absurdly long tunnels) and were beginning to think that there was nothing much going on besides trains and salarymen. This past weekend, however, we ended up forcing ourselves to explore further in search of a gig at an Irish pub, which took us into a fairly large pedestrian mall area that we would not have known about without making our way over there.
Anyway, this is where we ended up again tonight. As has happened many times before, we were searching for a café to rest in with a snack and some tea/coffee and, as has happened with equal frequency, we were stymied. Rachel's experience was our salvation in this case, as she led us into an underground mall, where we were treated to no end of small café's and restaurants. In fact, it is a curious facet of Japanese urban planning that so much real estate is devoted to malls. Department stores are often nothing but malls - and even when they are proper department stores, the usually have malls connected to them, sometimes as entire floors of the department store itself. Then in between the mall buildings, you have pedestrian malls, often in the form of covered arcades. Then below most of these you can find at least one (emphasis on the at least) underground mall. In any event, in this part of Umeda, the above ground arcades were full of bars, pachinko parlors and numerous variations on those themes - hence our consternation. And the underground mall was devoted to food - being billed as a "gourmet mall". My point, as you may be asking at this point, is that sometimes sauntering gets in the way of efficiency (i.e., had we simply used the phone to search for a café, we would have eaten much sooner), but I'm finding that it more often leads to worthwhile experiences - as long as one does not saunter off into the middle of an urban wasteland of whatever sort...

By way of a further defense of sauntering, I would like to end by cautiously announcing the arrival of fall. I realize that in this act I am throwing caution to the wind and have risked attracting the unwanted attention of the gods on Olympus. But I don't care - it's magnificent weather right now! And, as we have been taking advantage of it and choosing more leisurely routes back home, I have been noticing that this fall weather is very much like the California fall weather I grew up with. It's the type of thing that you don't notice that you've been missing until you experience it again. Especially the smells of the vegetation and the dirt - neither of which have suffered the cruel deaths that the midwestern winters foist upon the landscape. I imagine that in this instance the leisurely walking that we have chosen over directness has not only made for a nice change of pace and allowed us to explore the neighborhood, but has really made my experience of the season that much richer.

And now I will leave off of my verbal sauntering and think about packing for our night in Nagoya.