Japan 2012 - 2013

This morning was the usual routine, we tried to find a new place for breakfast. This time we walked through Shinsaibashi and thought we'd find a cafe that serves breakfast, well that ended up being harder than we thought! We went into a cafe that looked like a Starbucks because they had a breakfast menu out the front, I ordered their "breakfast set", then the others did after me, but after about 2 of us ordered that, they were supposedly sold out and the rest had to order something else!
The breakfast set included a toasted sandwich and a hot drink, but the sandwich was just a really small piece of thin bread microwaved with a slice of ham and some grated cheese. It was pretty crap!

Hard Rock Cafe at Universal CityWalk

Today was our last full unplanned day in Osaka, because tomorrow we are going to Universal Studios to celebrate new years eve, so today we went to go see the aquarium.

We went to find some breakfast, and ended up in another western-ish cafe near our hotel. It was an Italian place, but we ended up getting bacon, eggs and toast. I like most things about Japanese culture, but I hate the fact they still smoke indoors, so unfortunately this place was a bit smokey for our liking.

After that we made our way to the aquarium. It was raining most of the day today and while Jono brought an umbrella, none of us did. Last time we went to Japan, we did not get a single day of rain, so we assumed it would be the same this time, but that's not the case!
On our way to the aquarium, we stopped at a convenience store and bought some umbrellas. They cost 550 Yen, and they are everywhere! People even leave them around, so my mum didn't even need to buy one, she just found an abandoned one lying around.
Out the front of most places, they have disposable umbrella sleeves too, and they fit the cheap umbrella's perfectly, its a good system!

We got to the aquarium, and spent 2-3 hours there. The aquarium walks you through various sections that represent different parts of the world. Rather than describing all the areas, I'll just upload a bunch of photos. It was a bit hard to take photos in there with the low light, fast moving fish and just my kit lens, but with a high enough ISO, some of them turned out ok.













After the aquarium, we went across the road to a shopping centre for some lunch. We got our first proper Japanese lunch. I ordered a pork and egg okonomiyaki and it was really nice! (I'm not a big fan of okonomiyaki in Melbourne, they have too much cabbage! but there is lots of variety in Japan!)

My okonomiyaki lunch

After a bit shopping, we headed back to the hotel to freshen up. Before we went to dinner, we headed back to the shops from yesterday to buy the luggage I had my eye on. We found another place that sells luggage and they had a lot more variety! I thought we hit the jackpot until I realised I was converting the prices incorrectly. I found some luggage that I liked, and I thought it was $60, but it turns out if was $600... and all the others were around the same price. So we left there pretty quickly! :P

During lunch at the aquarium my parents got talking to some locals, and they recommended a restaurant where we actually fish out a your own fish to cook. They gave us a business card and said to look out for the giant crab on top of the building.


This building seemed to fit the bill, and they were booked out, so we waited an hour to get in... and then we realised it wasn't the right place! It was the first time I had fresh crab though, and it was a really nice restaurant! It looked like a traditional Japanese restaurant with our own private room with cardboard walls and the low table.



After dinner we just headed home, picked up some junk food and tried to find a suitable ATM.
It turns out that the ATMs in the convenience stores don't accept non-Japanese cards, even though they have the Visa logo on them, it rejected my Visa card, so tomorrow we need to find a bank that will accept international cards!

Going to bed now at 1:30AM was probably not a great idea considering tomorrow night (aka tonight) is new years eve... hopefully I don't fall asleep during the celebrations!

As promised, the first thing I did after getting up was take a few photos of our hotel.
Jonathan seems to be impressed with the color schemes, but other than that, it does look pretty fancy! It has a church on level 22, and there seems to be a lot of bridal shops, there is a few fancy restaurants around and an art gallery on the ground floor. The elevators have a kind of steam punk feel to them too, they have a fan in them that looks like a propeller and the buttons are little glass spheres.

The hotel lobby

A church on level 22 of the hotel

The fan inside the elevator

The entrance to the hotel

We missed the hotel breakfast, but by looking at the menu, the buffet breakfast costs $25, which we thought was a little expensive, so we went for a walk instead.
It was a nice sunny morning, the air was crisp, but we were all expecting it to be much colder so it was a pretty pleasant walk.

Back streets near our hotel

Most places seemed like they only served lunch and dinner and alot of places were just setting up for the day ahead, but we eventually found a place that had a breakfast menu.
As it turns out, we missed breakfast there too, but there lunch menu still had pancakes, raison toast, etc. so we just ordered and used that time to work out what we wanted to do with our limited time in Osaka.

Raison toast with freshly squeezed orange juice

We decided that the 3 main attractions we all wanted to see were the Osaka Castle, the Osaka Aquarium and some of the shopping areas. We headed back to our hotel to get some information from our concierge. We found out that alot of things are shut between Christmas and New Years, including Osaka Castle, so that left the shopping and the aquarium on the list.

We ended up going to a shopping area called "Shinsaibashi". It is a long (mostly undercover) street with lots of shops from food and coffee places to clothes and even a pachinko parlour.
We spent a couple of hours doing random shopping before meeting up at around 3:30PM.

Shinsaibashi

Shinsaibashi

Rob and Sarah met up with us a little bit earlier, so we thought we should check out the patchinko palour. Last time Rob and I were in Japan, we took a look inside one of these places, but we didn't play, so this time, we thought we'd give it a go!

Patchinko Parlour

We got some English instructions from the desk and eventually (sort of) worked it out.
You basically have to buy some ball bearings by putting some money in the Patchinko machine. The balls are collected in a tray at the base of the machine, and to play you have to turn a dial to start shooting the balls through a pinball looking obstacle course. Most of them simply fall to the bottom and disappear, but the goal is to get as many balls as you can into a small hole just above the bottom of the course, which is quite difficult. If you get enough in, then you can jackpot and win more ball bearings. The more you turn the dial, the faster the balls are launched into the course, so you need to keep adjusting the power until you find a level that works, that is the only control you have.

Every game is slightly different, but they all seem to have the same basic goal.
There may be a little more to it than that, but that was all we could gather from the instructions and an awkward conversation with the non-English speaking assistant. Needless to say I quite quickly lost my 1000 Yen with nothing to show for it! But I can say I've done it now :)

From here we headed to Umeda, where we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Umeda Sky Building. The building was pretty fancy looking and had a nice view of Osaka from the top.
We had our fill of sights, got a drink and then headed back to the Shinsaibashi shops and then back to the hotel.

The base of the Umeda Sky Building

The view from the top

The view from the top

It was a pretty good day and we had done a lot of walking, Shinsaibashi is quite a long stretch of shops, so we were all ready to put our feet up!

We made it!

The plan was to get to bed early, so we could leave our place at 3:30AM to get our 6:00AM flight from Melbourne. Jonathan was getting is own way there and he arrived half an hour before us, while Rob was going to drive to our place, leave his car there and get a taxi with us at 3:30AM.

We were all ready at 3:30AM and the taxi arrived right on time, we were just waiting for Rob to arrive. We loaded up our bags and then I got a call from Rob - he was lost, and instead of just being lost in our suburb, he was half an hour away!
We couldn't wait from him to arrive at our place, so we tried to offer suggestions for Rob but we had to leave if we were going to make our flight. Rob ended up driving through quite a few suburbs and ended up getting a lift from his dad. Surprisingly, he arrived not that long after us, which is quite impressive considering the detours and panicking before hand.

We checked in our luggage and went to get some breakfast, but even that took longer than expected, so by the time Rob and Jon had there meal, they had 5 minutes to eat it before our plane was boarding. We ended up getting on during the final call!

We arrived at Cairns and had to collect our baggage from the domestic terminal and check it in to the international terminal. Unfortunately they couldn't be checked right through from Melbourne to Osaka, but it was ok because we had a 3 hour stop over there, so plenty of time to kill!

The view from Cairns Airport

My luggage has already been a bit damaged over the years, one zipper has broken, and some of the plastic was missing, but it was still going strong. Unfortunately while we were in line to check in at Cairns, the handle broke off! So I think its safe to say it's done its fair share of travelling and I'm ready for a new one! Dragging it by a strap is not very fun!

After what seemed like a long flight, we finally arrived at Osaka and got some food... yea we got western food, we were all tired, it was a 'safe' option for everyone and we all wanted to see how different Japanese Macca's was like.

After that we found the train station. Before the trip I used Google Maps to find the best route from the airport to our hotel via public transport. The route I found was going to cost about $6, but had 2 change overs, but when we got to the station, there was another train network (Nankai) that had a direct route to Namba, where our hotel is, and it only cost us $12, which is still pretty cheap for a 35 minute train ride.
The train looked really cool too! It kind of had a steam punk feel to it and it was incredibly smooth! The inside was pretty good too, the seats had heaters under them and the seats could be rotated 180 degress with a foot pedal. It was a nice introduction to the awesome Japanese train system!

Fancy looking Nankai train

Happy tourists!

After walking through the rainy streets of Osaka, we found the building of our hotel ok, but getting in was a bit more difficult. The hotel shares the building with other businesses as well, including an art gallery, and they all have very similar names!

We finally found the hotel reception desk, it happened to be on level 22, but the elevators were a little hidden, and I'm sure there were plenty of signs, but they were mostly in Japanese!
The hotel is really nice! I haven't actually taken many photos yet, but I will soon!
We checked in and then went for a quick walk down the street to get some supplies before calling it a night. Most of us had gone for quite a while without much sleep, so we were looking forward to getting to a real bed!