the travels blog

Japan 2011 Day 6 - Osaka

Day 6 - we started off the morning with some breakfast - this is quite unusual since we haven’t had that much breakfast so far.

We went downstairs to the bakery and I got some freshly baked bread :) SK volunteered to be awesome and chose bread for all of us – and ahhhh soo good. After breakfast, we made our way to Osaka Aquarium!

osaka aquarium - AL’s thing!

The Aquarium was one big rectangular building of red and blue. Once at the Aquarium, we saw a lot of school kids (we suspect that this was an excursion day or something for kindy and stuff. So many little kids!) but there were some pretty cools fishes and mammals that swims. We saw the sea otter and dolphin feedings – this was ok but nothing spectacular. The main attraction, the whaleshark, was hugeeeeeeee! It was like, this massive fish which had a lot of little fish following it.

[huge whaleshark]

Wherever it went, there were like tens of little fishes following it. Apart from that, we also saw the finless porpoise, several sting rays as well as the largest rodent in the world! It was this…. Large rodent. Yeah. Hard to explain I guess.

[errr. worlds largest rodent. yeah. fugly]

And penguins!

[penguins!]

Took us 3 hours to circle one of the world’s biggest water tank (about 8m deep) but it was a cool experience. After aquarium - it was towards lunch (and the Osaka skybridge)!

But on the way to lunch, we found a ¥100 shop. Woooooo, a bit of shopping there! Then off to a Japanese food court for some katsu-don for me!

Once we finished lunch, we headed towards the Floating Garden which has an observatory level on level40 which gets a whole 360 view of Osaka. Pretty epic.

[stairway to heaven]

[osaka city!]

[love heart locks at osaka floating gardens, lvl40]

[view of the floating gardens from ground floor]

After this floating gardens thing - it was back to the hotel for a nap. Man its tiring doing things everyday and waking at 7am!

On the way to the hotel we saw a sign of Osaka, which in Chinese apparently meant “big slap”. Lols.

[big slap?]

We spotted a department store and decided to utilise its warmth and do a bit window shopping (or shopping for SK). JG found a floor that sold just games and toys, and bought 3 jigsaw puzzles. AL found random bleach stuff, while SK found a bargain of a coat and MZ bought something cool for his brother. I got a lego capsule thingy and with the luck of the draw I got the character I wanted, which was a baseball player. Win. Department store done, we went off to the hotel for some rest before dinner and some asian clubbing.

After well rested for 90min, we headed to Doutonburi for dinner - we (more like I did) chose an authentic ramen place, probably sits only 15 and you have to order from the machine outside and then your ramen is made to order inside. In 5 degrees, ramen is just awesome. I ordered pork miso ramen :)

[the machine outside you order ramen from]

[authentic ramen place win]

After ramen, it was a bit too early to enter the nightclub “pure” that MZ researched, so we walked around Osaka city until the nightclub opened (opens at 10m) so we went to the bookshop to pass time. Yes quite sad. After entering the club again, note not puree, it was empty (much to our dismay) and so begins our night of failed drinking and clubbing.

[unlimited drinks]

[unlimited drinks list]

[the creepy people on the dance floor that kept on asking girls to join them lol]

[drinks drinks drinks. MW style]

We totally just MW-ed on drinks, and after about 2.5 hours, we called it a night.