the travels blog

Japan 2011 Day 7 – Osaka incl Nara

Day 7 - after “clubbing”, we allowed ourselves a “late” start to the day and woke up at around 9. We also found that MZ in his mission to get his money’s worth from drinking last night had failed and vomited last night. Luckily, into the toilet bowl and nothing else.

Nara and deer here we come. We managed to make our way to the JR-Namba station at 10:30 and then we switched at Tennoji station onto a rapid train that goes quite quickly, but still not Shinkansen speed. AL and MZ reckons its about 100kph?

Nara Park

We got to Nara, and we had to walk towards Nara Park where all the deer were located and where Todaiji Temple is - which houses the “giant-as” Buddha.

making sure we are at the right place

it is one giant temple

the giant buddha

teehee

The Buddha was really big - but not as big as the ones in Thailand though. But man Nara Park has a lot of deer! At the end of the day MZ said he took like 200 photos of deer, that just provides you an idea of how many deer there are!

deer. so many deer

SK bought some ‘cookies’ to feed the deer and got hunted down by the deer. pretty epic lol. the following photo provides evidence why you shouldn’t do so:

deer are smart. dont buy them cookies i say.

the warning sign

Inside Nara Park AL also found his most coveted food - sweet potato!

sweet potato cart

After deer and Buddha we decided to have lunch at a Japanese place where it was sooo cheap and food was relatively good :) the menu were caricatures, not even photos lol. Pretty unusual.

After lunch, it was back to Osaka where we have some “free time” for 3-4 hours where we could do anything and to reconvene at 7:45pm. MZ plans to sleep, AL to the south side of Namba, SK and JG plan to do their bit of shopping at Shinsaibashi. I planned to visit the Nike store - who knows, mayble ill find a bargain of football boots.

Went into Nike - found that they sold NO proper football boots! How disappointing. It seems that Japanese people are really into their stylish hi-cut Nike boots - so many of them are sold! There was even a Nike ID booth where you can personalise your own shoes with the help of a shop assistant and seeing the actual material you are choosing from etc!

After that I went into the Apple Store, to which I found out that it has free wifi - BIS and BBM works too! The irony is not lost on me - using Apple’s free internet on my Blackberry!

I also ventured into parts of Namba and Shinsaibashi - I found this store that had 10 floors of sporting goods! Fking A!

I ventured and saw all 3 floors of skiing and snowboarding stuff, and other floors of footballing stuff. So win.

sporting goods :)

After our allocated “free time” had ended - it was time for shabu-shabu! The girls found one on Shinsaibashi and it was good. It also sold quite unusual sushis!

some unusual sushi they had

SK and MZ ordered stuff like mantis prawn, firefly squid, squid urchin, AL had herring roe, crab miso paste, quail egg & yam, JG had squid urchin, firefly squid and crab miso paste while I had crab miso paste, quail egg & yam as well as “young chicken” which was raw chicken sashimi! The chicken was odd - very very chewy. Everyone else was a bit worried since 100% of chicken has salmonella, but I powered on and still lived.

raw chicken sushi!

The quail egg and yam was weird too - AL almost spasmed his way through it and I also flinched while eating - it was so weird texture wise and taste wise!

After finishing gourmet sushi and delicious shabu-shabu, we were stuffed and decided to follow people around Shinsaibashi - we chose a couple but then after a few minutes realised they were walking away from the hotel. So MZ made an executive decision and chose another couple which were headed towards our hotel. We followed them “assassin’s creed” style for 15min until we realised they were headed towards the train station where we then decided to call it a night.

But before bed, we decided to spend some ‘quality time’ together.

making lego is awesome. so awesome

how many can you stack

good night beautiful Osaka!