Japan - Osaka - Day 2

Sunday 14th May

Afer waking up at 2am and 5am I finally woke up at 6am and lay in bed for hours thinking. Eventually I got up at 8. Kara knocked at 9am and we went down to get breakfast. I opted for the American style breakfast and was greeted by scrambled eggs, ham and bacon. I don't think I'm quite up to cold fish first thing in the morning yet. Afterwards we set out to Namba.

It was fairly overcast, but after a few hundred yards the decision to bring a coat was looking pretty foolish. After waiting for Kara to corner a pigeon so she could get a photo -"it's a different colour from ours", we made our way to the nearest subway station. Our first encounter with a subway ticket machine went fairly smoothly although we paid about 50yen too much. Finding the correct exit at Namba however was a struggle. Evntually we found our way up to street level and were greeted by the kind of street scene that I had been expecting. Large signs, hundreds of people and pachinko parlours everywhere. My knowledge of pachinko only extends as far as knowing that it's a kind of vertical pinball and gambling can be involved. Narrow streets with masses of overhead cables snaked off in every direction and cars moved slowly past.

We had a long 2 hour walk around the Namba area taking in all the sights, sounds and smells: Namba Parks - a shopping centre with picturesque rooftop gardens, Nan-Nan Town and Dotombori packed with all sorts of restaurants and street site vendors. Giant mechanical crabs, robotic clowns beating drums, barbequed crab claws, it was all here.

The Dotombori area is still having a pedestrianised area built so only a bit of the waterfront was accessible. It featured an arcade with a giant london eye-style ferris oval. We then headed back to Nan-Nan Town to buy some tako-yaki - a local speciality of octopus in fried batter cooked before our eyes. 8 of them turned out to be too many, but at £1.40 offered great value. We sat in the rooftop gardens at Namba Parks to eat and then headed back to the hotel. What jet lag I had hadn't completely worn off and we had a quick sleep before heading out to the Awaza district again for some food. This time Kara and I tried a Chinese restaurant just aross the river. The menus were completely in Kanji so we had to hedge our bets and write down the Kanji of what we wanted based on the wax models outside. Unfortunately our food was covered in a thick layer of pure MSG, but once this had been scraped off the food was perfectly fine.