Osaka pancakes; ferris wheel; Hanshin Tigers

One of todays highlights from today were special pancakes for lunch, an Osaka local dish. They are cabbage pancakes and the traditional basic one has thin strips of pork on the top. They bring them cooked to your table, but then put them on a built in grill on the table so they keep warm. Incredible. Wonder if you can find such a thing in LA. If not, what a business opportunity.

Later in the day we went on a monster ferris wheel that is built on the top of a 13 story building. So before you even start you are pretty high up. Not a terribly scary wheel, but quite a view from the top. Osaka is a huge metropolis, very dense. I wonder how it compares to LA in surface area. They certainly have better mass transit, Ill tell you that!

You would not believe the baseball game we saw tonight. The Hanshin Tigers, the Osaka team, beat the Yakamura Swallows 6-2. From about 30 minutes before the game until 30 minutes after the game ended the crowd was cheering and chanting almost non-stop! It was unreal. Actually, they don:t chant when the visiting team is at bat. But the entire time the home team is at bat they are cheering, saying the players name as part of an organized chant/ Pounding plastic bats together. Just totally into the game. After the second out of the top of the 7th everyone blows up these balloons and when the third out happens they let them go into the air and start singing the Hanshin Tigers Team Song......which they also sing 5 times at the end of the game after another balloon let go. After which they have a three or four verse chant they sing for every player in the starting line up. People come dressed in team gear, almost as much as a Michigan football game. Yellow and black, of course. They have official cheer leaders, and not the type in short skirts but men in white gloves who stand the whole game and literally lead the cheers. Drums and trumpets in the right field bleachers. You just would not believe it. There is more cheering in the first inning than in an entire game at any major league park Ive ever seen. These people are rabid fans. Nathans brother in law was sitting next to me and didn:t stop the whole game, except when he would be talking to me and telling me about a player (he speaks a little English) or he was talking to one of his two kids. The whole family came including Makis parents. We had bento boxes for food and Asahi beer. If you bring a can of beer to the stadium, instead of confiscating it they pour it into a cup for you to take in to the ballpark. Just an out of control experience.

The level of play, however, was probably about AA. Pitching was poor and defense so so. Yakamura made three very costly and bush league errors in the first and let 3 runs score. No, it was two errors and a wild pitch. There were a couple of nice infield plays, though, and the Tigers turned two double plays. The Tigers closer came in after the pitcher that started the 9th gave up a hit on his first pitch and the crowd went nuts, like Gagne. Very much fun.