Exploring Osaka

Gotta love a buffet breakfast. Here along with the staples of runny scrambled eggs and warm bacon you get traditional Japanese things too. If you're smart you eat the japanese stuff like grilled fish, rice and tofu and are not hungry all day. If you're like me you go back for seconds of bacon and hash browns and pay for it later.

After we ate we headed to Umeda for a flea market. Our relationship with Umeda had always been a rocky one – it's hella hard to navigate, none of the roads are straight (like in Namba or Shinsaibashi) and all the maps suck. After a few tense moments we stumbled upon the temple hosting the market. Kind of cool but not really worth the stress. The best thing there was probably these little carved wooden figurines of people having sex. But at Y1500, not really a good investment (unlike the remote control ufo i'm planning on getting).



Next we headed back to the station, where we were sidetracked by a croquette craving. Three hours later, and we exited the departo food court armed with croquettes, sushi, rice balls, green globs covered in peanut and some fancy pants desserts.





We headed back to the hotel to eat after which we went shopping for shoes for Lu – Shinsaibashi and Amerika Mura. If there's one thing I will never tire of looking at it's Nintendo-related stuff – the three vending machine toys and being dragged from Mandarake a case in point. Lu copped a nice pair of pumas and we hit YaMaYa in Shinsaibashi to get the world's best museli and some beer – this place is the best thing about staying at the Chisun – it's next door and a bottle of Bombay is only Y1480. After that we were ready for some serious sitting down and eating. Doutour is a coffee chain here – they're everywhere and we were next to one so we went in with cake on our minds. I never hit Coffee chains at home so I don't know if your star buck or Gloria jeans do a black coffee with ice. That's my jam. An iced coffee was accompanied by a cake I'm gonna copy and get rich from back home – crepes and cream layered thinly layered and covered with maple syrup. Simple. Deadly.

Really though, all of this was leading to the day's climax: dinner and karaoke. After composing ourselves at the hotel (ie eating M&Ms and smashing a few beers) we headed to Fugetsu – an okonomiyaki chain. The one on Dotonbori was full so we headed to the one in ameMura. Straight in and we were served by the same dude who served us when we went there for the first time a year ago. Places like this are good for a couple of things – food obviously, and watching how much of it japanese people can put away. It's out of control. We both had an Okonomiyaki each and I had some squid, but these 2 girls between them had an omlette (the football shaped one stuffed with rice), squid, okonomiyaki, yakisoba washed down with couple of tall frosty ones. Maybe it's some unspoken competition they have to see how much the can eat but holy moly it's amazing. These two tiny girls eating enough for four.





Our karaoke target was Big Echo in Dotonbori. Armed with our amazingly shitty japanese we managed to hire a room with nomihodai – possibly the greatest japanese word ever – all you can drink. So yeah, there was only two of us but we tore that shit apart. Song selection was incredible and if you've never heard Lu belt out Journey you haven't lived. Ordering beers was a bit of a nightmare with our language skills but I don't really remember getting back to the hotel, or hitting the convenience store for Pringles on the way so we must've done alright.