Day Off in Osaka, Japan

The Japanese promoter was kind enough to place a large fruit basket in everyone's room upon arrival yesterday. There were bananas, kiwi fruit, strawberries, apples, grapefruit, and a big, fat juicy mango. Had the mango for breakfast as soon as I got up today. I'd never had fresh mango until my trip to the Philippines back in October, when I fell in love with it. If you've never had a fresh mango, go getcha one right NOW. You'll love it!

Here's something neat. In this hotel, your morning newspaper arrives heat-sealed in plastic so that it hasn't touched the floor and gotten dirty. I'm surprised it didn't come with a pair of white cotton gloves with which to read it.

All the taxi drivers wear white gloves, too.

As if I needed any other reasons to love this place, the toilet rocks! Can you say "bidet" or what?

And here is the control panel on the toilet in my room:Click this to enlarge it - the icons are pretty funny!

We're talking heated seat, two kinds of spray, water pressure control, and deodorizer! I want one of these back home! Robert, our production manager, says he's gonna buy one and ship it home on this trip. He told me when he'd been here before with Kiss, he shipped one home for Paul Stanley. All I know is that it'll spoil the hell out of you.

Tonight, seven of us went out to the shopping district. Several folks were buying stuff for their kitchens from these awesome gadget stores. And the selection of cutlery is just insane here. And cheap, too!

Shopping district:



Right down from the last place we visited, we found this shit on the roll-up door of one of the shops that had closed early. What on earth this is about is beyond me! Is this some kind of Nazi store??? We'll never know, I guess, but I can tell you that I wanted to go buy a can of spray paint and paint over this shit…

After shopping, we stopped for dinner. We used the basic "point and order" method with our waiter, who didn't speak a word of English. It took us about 15 minutes to complete our order. After we all struggled through that process, he then went away and came back with an English version of the menu. D'oh!

We pretty much treated it all like tapas and shared around the table. My favorite was the deep-fried smelts, tiny fish about 4 inches long that are eaten whole. I got some shrimp fried rice that was terrific, too.

The food kept coming at us in waves, until everyone was too stuffed to jump.

After dinner, most of us headed back to our hotel. Long day and tomorrow we have a show. When I got to my room, I noticed how cool the palace across the way looked, all lit up at night.

Here's what it looked like during the day.