Osaka

To start I’ve got this coin holder off Temu because I had heard that you got a lot of coins in Japan and honestly, I thought it was a bit of a gimmick but they were like a dollar  it’s actually turned out to be very helpful.  After you get your change back, you can put each coin into the right slot  I find when I’m in another country using a different currency. I always end up with a lot of change because when you’re at the cash trying to pay it feels like it takes way too much time to sort through the coins since you don’t automatically know what each coin is and you have to search but when they’re nicely sorted like this, you can easily find a $.10 50 Cent etc. and you don’t end up with a whole coin purse full of change

We left the hotel room at about 8:20 AM this morning to take the train to Osaka

We arrived at about 10:30 AM and it was too early to check into our Airbnb so we stored our luggage in these lockers At the train

First thing we did was walk over to the grounds of Osaka castle. We didn’t go inside. It’s a museum in there, but we just wandered around the grounds and took some pictures of the castle.

It had been a few hours since breakfast and we are all getting a bit hungry as we were walking the grounds and I said to Trav man these grounds really needed a dango shack and low and behold, we turned the corner and there was a whole street food street set up.  perfect!

Joel chose these deep fried Dangos

Owen got his favourite the candied strawberries on a stick

And I got a tornado potato. These are everywhere in Japan.

And Trevor and I were very excited to see a street food version of okonomiyaki. its an Osaka specialty but we know the kids wouldn’t like it so weren’t sure we’d make it to a restaurant. It’s a pancake tup thing made of batter and shredded cabbage and meat or fish and toppings. This was so delicious!!

Osaka Castle

From there, we took the metro over to Shinsekai. This area was sort of modelled after Coney Island. There are lots of carnival games and shops and food and this tower is the centrepiece -Tsūtenkaku Tower

Trevor and I were trying to check foods off of our scavenger hunt list but since this was our last real day in Japan since tomorrow, we’re just going to a theme park. The kids really wanted to eat sushi and Ramen so we ended up at a restaurant that served both ramen and Japanese curry.  Trevor and I got to have the pork Tonkatsu curry. We did not get the one below, which was hilarious The waitress didn’t speak a word of English and spoken in a very angry and brisk manner, but we managed to get our food ordered, and it was all really good

Our Curry

The kids Roman came with a pile of green onions that was literally a full bowl full of green onions. Owen and Anna don’t like green onions so we managed to scrape them into a Ziploc bag while the waitress wasn’t looking. 😆 Anna did her best on this bowl of Ramen but didn’t quite finish all the pork pieces there was a lot. Owen managed to eat almost the entire thing and he said the broth was delicious.

Don’t got a different sort of Ramen and his didn’t come with quite so many green onions

Our bag of green onions, we smuggled out

From there, we walked over to the tower, which was right nearbyThe mascot of Shinsekai is Billiken  He is a “god of thibgs as they ought to be” and is a funny looking little guy and people think it’s good luck to rub his feet  

We saw these Tokyo bananas in one of our YouTube videos as a popular souvenir to get in this area so we had to try them. They’re just like a little banana shaped cake that taste like banana. They were all right.

This area is very itchy with huge over the top signage similar to the Dotonbori area that we went to later

We went up the tower This was an official picture they tried to get us to buy, and then they gave us this tiny little version for free when we didn’t it

The tower was fun and great views, but there was a lot of waiting for elevators so there was maybe 5 minutes of waiting for every one minute of fun and we were kind of tired at the end of it

They had this very cool overhang thing that hung off the side of the building with a glass floor Owen Trev and Joel all went to on it and they all said it was terrifying

Owen as Billiken

The tower also had this slide that you could do that you basically slid from halfway up the tower around the building on the slide outside and down to the bottom so we decided to do that Was like a very fast very steep water slide, and it was actually about as scary as I was willing to do any scarier and it would not have been fun, but it actually was pretty fun. And the helmets were shaped like takoyaki, which are the octopus balls that are very popular in Osaka

Shooting at the bottom

This is the slide

They have these go karts that people drive around town. I’ve seen them in here, Kyoto and Tokyo people dress up in super Mario Brothers costumes and drive these around the main streets of the city. They actually look terrifying because they’re on the roads with all the regular vehicles.

Getting one of our many vending machine drink

We tried a couple of the carnival game type things first was archer

Joel was a master and hit the target six times in a row

Everybody absolutely love playing this game where you had to shoot at candy and chocolates and if you hit them and knocked them off, you got to keep them

With the winnings

These are in every second shop where you can play the shooting game and everybody loved it so much that we did it one more time and here’s our second round of winnings

Trap specifically shot at these cigarettes candies because he thought they were funny

This was a sumo wrestling restaurant where everything you ordered came in sumo sizes

I really wanted one of these wobbly swords filled with baby Costello’s, which are like mini filled waffles but the place was closed today. You had seen our YouTuber get these and I had it on my list. :(

I just thought this was a funny picture of Owen taking the subway home with all the Japanese people

Then we went and got our luggage and checked into our Airbnb seems really good You really aren’t here long just tonight and then tomorrow at Universal will leave early and probably get home quite late so we really won’t spend too much time here it’s in a extremely convenient location in the city. It’s basically on top of the subway station and on top of a 7-Eleven and it’s a five minute walk from the main sites at Dotonbori. The kids had some downtime while Trevor and I unpacked and ran to 7-Eleven for some breakfast stuff

The bath is so funny there’s no faucet you use one of these control panels on the wall to set the temperature of the water you want and then you click the button and it starts to fill up from inside the tub. Joel was in there for five minutes and could not figure out how to get water in the tub.  Also, that’s a TV so you can watch TV in the tub

Trev got some dried squid at 7:11 and it was not a hit with anyone

After a quick rest, we headed out to see Nova Yasaka shrine, which is a large lion head shrine fortunately, when we got there, it was closed and we couldn’t see it at all. I didn’t realize it had a closing time. that was a bit of a waste of time, unfortunately from there to try to make up some time, we decided to take a cab to the area we were trying to get to the kids really wanted to go back to the same chain of conveyor sushi that we got the first time we did it

We are pros at it now. Here are all of our plates that we had at the end. Trevor and I tried to eat late cause we knew we wanted some snacks and street food

A lot of the upcoming pictures will be the kitschy signs Dotonbori. It was really fun to walk around our time in Osaka seemed a bit rushed. I wish we had one more day and one more evening so that we could’ve wandered a little bit more tonight but we were tired, but we have an early day at Universal tomorrow so we just needed to get back.

For some reason, the people on the microphone, giving the tours on these boats were dressed up crazy, and this guy was dancing like mad with dance music on his boat. It was really funny to watch.

The very famous Osaka running man sign

This is the mascot of Don Quijote, everyone’s favourite store. We needed to go back one more time so the kids could spend their souvenir money

I wish I could accurately capture the absolute insanity of these stores, but I just can’t. The aisles are so tiny and there are floors after floors of just millions of things everywhere and millions of people and every aisle has sounds going off. It’s very overwhelming to be in there. 

Our goal for the last bit of the walk was to find some takoyaki which is octopus balls and is the main street food in Osaka

We had given the kids a few dollars and left them in the arcade since they weren’t interested in lining up for a street food they also realize that they could sometimes find some coins in the coin return that people had left there so they went around looking for coins and I think they found about seven dollars so that they can play more games

I was not a fan of the takoyaki. Trevor thought it was OK, but there was no way we could eat all of that after our sushi so we just ate a bit of it. It looks like they be fried and crispy, but they’re actually fairly gooey inside What I really didn’t like about it was the very smoky flavor. I think that came from the Bonita flakes that they put on top of it.

The ambiance was great and the streets are really wide, so even though there’s a lot of people it doesn’t seem like you’re completely on top of each other like it does on some of the narrow street you’ve been on

Then one last street food we had to try was the ice cream filled melon pan me and Trev and Owen split this. Just none of us were very hungry, but we just had to try it. Melon pan has been one of Owen‘s favourites here in Japan.

Then we had to try this hilarious thing which was a takoyaki photo opportunity. They had these takoyaki hats hanging from it that you could put on and stick your heads through so funny.

And then we headed back for the night it’s almost 11 PM here now and I am ready for bed because we have our alarm set for 6 AM to leave for universal early. 20,000 steps today!