Japan - Osaka - Day 13 & 14

- Tuesday, October 13th 2015 -

 Ahhh, the final days of Japan.  What a whirl wind it's been!  I'll always remember the actual trip favorably, no matter what happens!

Today we got up and headed on out to the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan.  Train wise it wasn't hard to get too, I let Emma navigate the train part.  Walking though, I was able to spot the signs pointing us in the direction of Kaiyukan.  We stopped at a Lawsons and stocked up on snackage and headed off after basically everyone else walking.  There was a huge giraffe made of Lego's outside of the building a little ways, and fountains as you got closer.  It was really neat!

Only downfall about the visit was... can you guess?  School field trip!  Excited kids did not remember their indoor voices, and apparently it's ok to tap/smack/hit the glass to get animals attention...?  Anyway, other than not being able to really hear much other than the ambient noise of happy children, it was a very cool experience!  We even got to pet some stingray and sharks!  There's 70 photos below, so I'm just going to do a cut right off the bat.

This little guy had crawled up his enclosure and was nearish to the top!

 

The sea lions didn't really care to turn around. 

 SHHHHARRK!  So this is part of the main 'inside' enclosure.  It's huge and stretches all ... 5 floors? of the upper level of the Aquarium.  It's really neat.  You basically circle this huge center part and have things on the sides and off down hallways to interact with and view.  Starting at the top of the Aquarium and working your way down, you get to see all the levels of sea-dwelling critters.

   EEEELLLLL

 This one had a face only a mother could love.

 Raaays!  Getting their tank cleaned.  This is the same tank as the Shark i think.

 Turtle!

 These Giant Spider Crabs were jerks.  They just kept stepping on the fish in their tank.  If you check out the bottom right of the tank, there's a fish with an eye stabbed out, the crab by him kept stepping on him and he barely moved. 

 There are TWO crabs in this photo.  I adjusted the colors a little so you could spot the fuzzy one better.

There was another pirate ship (ferry?) out the window from lunch.  Half way through the aquarium there's a "mermaid" cafe.  We replenished with soda and curry bread.

Emma's getting used to me taking her pics. 

we thought it was pretty, then realized it's a squid.

The following is jellyfish spam.  No apologies.

these belong to the guy in the above pic.

 End of Jellyfish.

 There was ice falling into this seal's enclosure.  Super cold, he wouldn't stop swimming about so I couldn't get a good photo, but it was really cool to see actual meltable ice!

 On the left Emma (finally) got to touch a stingray! Her short little arms made it hard to reach them, as they didn't often come close to the edge.  They're smoother than I expected...not really slimy though.  On the right, Emma's petting a shark that's just happy to lay there and get touched.  He was much less smooth.

There was one fatality...

 Couldn't read the caption by this thing, but I do wonder who owned that set of chompers!

 Terrifying dead thing above.  Cool though.

They had Isopods in the aquarium as well. It was too dark to photograph them.  But man I really wanted one of these plushies.  Couldn't justify the cost unfortunately.  THEY'RE SO COOL.

you can see the castle in the distance.

After that we headed on out for Osaka Castle!  Which is a replica, like almost everything in Japan.  Still it was really neat, a good long gardeny walk.  Emma and I stopped at the fountain for selfies as well, and mild pigeon harassing (they wouldn't MOVE).

DOOOOOOOOOOOOM stairs. 

 Could you imagine trying to scale those walls as an attacker?  And how threatening that moat would be?  There's similar walls on the right.

 Such a pretty castle.  A disgruntled tourist agreed to take Emma and I's photo while we were there.  His vacation clearly wasn't going very well.

 Being me, I saw people up at the top on the approach and went "LETS GO THERE!"  So the elevator would take us up.. uh...4? floors? or was it five? IDK, we walked up stairs the final two flights (there's one way stairs, pretty nice).  Not a ton of room from the top, but it was a pretty view of Osaka.  .... Osaka likes Farris Wheels.

 Most of the museum didn't have much to photograph.  It was neat, and there were things to read in English which was helpful.  Most of the things you could watch though were only in Japanese. 

This thing had audio that explained what was going on.

 There was a few of these (two?) we watched information on the other one (that we couldn't photograph).  The detail in these are incredible.  I can't imagine how long it must've taken the artist, or what kind of chaos his mind must have been in to remember and paint all of the gorey details.

We headed out after briefly browsing the gift shop, not really seeing anything we couldn't live without.

 Bye bye Osaka Castle!  And above/rightish, there were some women in traditional Korean clothing.

We hunted this place back down, Emma saying "for chocolate icecream"... I got the Chocolate icecream, she got corn... weird girl.

So, after that we headed on back to our hotel.  Going to pack here and there for tomorrow and waste time until our food tour guide came to get us.  We were told it would be a "Street Food and Izakaya Night Tour of Osaka" but it wasn't.
We got dolled up and headed out to meet our guide; Mr Yoshinori Hasegawa.  A lean man with a quick step.  He wasted no time walking us down the road, across the bridge, and down the waterway to take a boat tour.  I was a little confused, why are we doing a boat ride on a food tour?  Eh. It set off at 6:15 and we did enjoy what we could understand, and what was translated here and there for us.  But I'm still a little confused on why we did that.

All the photos of the food thing are by Emma (or the tour guide)

On the water.

 Glico is a candy brand, in the daytime lots of people do the same pose as him and take photos with him.

 Rose lips is a Love hotel.  And the one with the blue light is a super high end restaurant.

 SELFIES

This was under a bridge, random cool light.

  

The shrine was a different one, you splash water on the statue before saying your prayer.  The right, the door with the white curtain hanging down is where we ate.  Narrow alley! 

Our guide snapped a photo of us.  Now, I don't want to sound like an ass, but this is NOT street food.  I saw the bill, it was right about $140 for the 3 of us.  Emma has the list of all the food we ate and i added it right under this paragraph.  But the shrimp was pretty good, all of it was good honestly.  I drank Ginger Ale and she had Coke as usual.  I ate my veggies and everything in front of me.  All of it was tasty.  Desert was a sweet cream and grape..and... melon? I think.   

 1. Fried kale with herring eggs.

2. Fried whole shrimp (whiskers included).
3. Fried kid cod with roe.
4. Fried beef.
5. Fried avocado with eggs and mayonnaise.
6. Fried sawara (spring fish).
7. Fried mochi with roe.
8. Fried pork with mustard.
9. Fried maitaka mushroom.
10. Fried potato.
11. Fried duck with pear.
12. Fried croquet.
13. Ochasuki soup.

 So instead of this "Izakaya Night Tour" he insisted we go eat more... we continued through Dōtonbori to a Ramen place we had to take an elevator to get to.  Emma tried udon noodles and liked them, I wasn't a huge fan of my Duck Ramen.  Duck is weird...the soup was fine.  The guide ordered us a strange desert mochi which I wasn't a fan of, but ate enough to be polite.  He'd walk us back to our hotel then and leave me feeling a LITTLE cheated.  I was really looking forward to sampling street food visiting Japanese pubs.  The food we had WAS really good (Uh, was this the Otone place? I have no idea... I know Emma didn't give me the card, she stuffed it in her wallet with promises to give me one and didn't. Phfft, fail.).
SO yeah, I'm not that pleased. We went to a super classy place where romantic couples go and to a ramen place.  Not...to a bar, or to street food.  Anyway.  Enough complaining. Food was good, I just didn't get what I was expecting (or thought I was paying for). Meh. 

Attractive sewer cover too.  So we went back to our hotel and finished our cheesecake.


 - Wednesday, October 14th 2015 -

Goodies!

My flight was heading out around 4, and we had tickets to take the Rapit 39 at 1:05. So we slept in, packed up, checked out and stored our bags and faffed about online for awhile. Then we went for a wander and decided to go find someplace to munch and people watch.  Our first choice, super tasty looking waffle place, was take out only.  We'd seen a Starbucks, so just went there.  They had a double chocolate frappuccino, but I went for the caramel one.  For some reason this girl's not craving chocolate as badly!?  We people watched for awhile, then headed back to the hotel again.  Getting our things and heading to the train station!

Boredly waiting.

We had hoped that Emma could check her bags (her flight wasn't until midnight!) and keep me company, but that wasn't the case.  I went on through security and all that jazz, got to my gate and signed online.  Apparently across from Emma was a pokemon store.  We wasted some time online, then when my area started getting busy I packed up.  Got called to the podium, they 'upgraded' my seat to an aisle.  I was disgruntled about this and got a window. There was an entire highschool on our flight, all in economy.  I'd payed for Economy Plus back when first booking this trip so I could sit with my ex-traveling companion.  Anyway.  Shuffle worked out enough.  The lady next to me was very rude, but her husband was nice enough.

KIX is on an island.

Don't you hate it when people don't stay in their seat?  Her elbows, personal belongings, slightly oversized for the seat self kept crossing over towards me.  Bleh...and when I had to use the restroom, there was a small line, and she just barged through and tried opening the doors.  We're like "Uh...line's over here".
Blleeeeh.

Anyway, that was KIX to SFO.  We landed in SFO and I got through security with no real problems.  I do find picking up your bag just to walk a few feet and send it back away a bit dumb.  Oh well.  Bag got rechecked, lines took awhile but whatever.  Getting to my gate again was a pain in the rump, you go through security right outside your gate, which is a bit of a walk from where I came in at.  Security was slow.  Got to my gate, got some snacks, and was bored for awhile.  Unfortunately, I was jamming to my music and missed that they changed my gate.  I heard "Final boarding call" and hoofed it down the lane a few gates.  Got there in time, but my seat was taken by someone else.  Reserved seating, bitch.  Anyway, worked out for me, as the row one back had the aisle for the hour long flight to LAX.  The person next to me didn't chat which was fine.
We got in late, and I had eight minutes from when the lines started moving to when my plane was suppose to board.  Fortunately it wasn't far away and I even had a chance to use the restroom.  Boarding was delayed, again.  But we all got on, I tuned out whoever was next to me.  United domestic doesn't have free in flight entertainment. So it's reading and music to keep yourself busy.  Only a two hour flight that time so it was fine by me.  They had some United Express passengers that were late for their flights.  Most of the back of the plane was happy to wait to let them all dash to catch their flight.  People towards the front were rude and took their sweet time.

Anyway, got to see my parents! Never came across a currency exchange booth this time, so I've got about $20 in yen still.  Oh well.  Nice to see the family, nice to walk out to the car.  They took me out to Perkins where I didn't eat pancakes (gasp horror).  The chocolate malt was amazing though.  We got some muffins to go, and mom was evil and ate my Apple Cinnamon thinking it was Cranberry Orange (how do you mistake that?!)

Otherwise, got home around 11 at night and made myself flop into bed.  I don't remember if I slept much, I know the following night I couldn't sleep.  Now, more than a week later, I'm still not adjusted!