Dear all,
Monday started slowly with breakfast at a small cafe near the station. A traditional Japanese breakfast is expensive and I'm really not a fan of fish for breakfast. So we tried the Japanese attempts at a western breakfast; big thick toast with boiled eggs. Wasn't bad at all, dad had a sausage with his that was more like a big frankfurt and dan had scrambled egg on toast with a weird mustard sauce. A little strange but still good.
Monday we caught the subway north to Umeda. There are two main centres in Osaka, Namba (where we're staying) and Umeda (where I normally played when I lived here because it was closer to home). I took mum and dad to my favourite ramen noodle shop (big bowls of water soup with thin noodles with beanshoots and meat, VERY delicious, my favourite) and gyoza (kind of like dimsims but alot tastier). We wandered the shops and visited hep 5, a huge shopping centre with a life size whale in the middle and a ferris wheel on the top. We rode the ferris wheel and enjoyed the views of the city, mum and dad were amazed that the city never seems to end. As far as you can see there a buildings.
From Hep 5 we stopped at Yodobashi Camera, a HUGE electronics store...6 FLOORS! dad was in heaven. On sunday the button to take the photos on mum and dads camera fell off and got lost, so we spent a very looonnnggggg time testing the cameras..firstly changing the language to english and then taking photos of people and testing out the zoom. I'm not sure anyone else appreciated us changing the language but anyway, they'll figure it out..Mum and dad ended up going back today and buying a very nice new fuji camera.
We also visited the game centres and took some purikura (the photo machines that make the little photo stickers) and played some games. Unluckily, we left umeda just on peak time and although it wasnt crushing it was still really busy and we just went with the flow of the crowd..
Last night for dinner we went to "gyukaku" and cooked our own dinner :) It was a tiny restuarant 6 floors up with an even tinier lift...only 3 of us fitted in the lift, so dad waited at the bottom. We arrived at the top and were asked to take our shoes off. We sat down and waited for dad..who arrived and walked straight past all our shoes with his shoes on to then be quickly followed by the little japanese waitress who made him go back and take his shoes off..oops.We grilled think slices of meat and vegetables in a grill in the middle of the table. very tasty.
Today we went to Osaka Aquarium. Its an amazing aquarium. We saw fish, otters, sea otters (which are about 4 times bigger and hairier than normal brown otters), fish, turtles, WHALE SHARK!, huge manta rays, fish, jelly fish, dolphins, seals, fish, sharks, really really big deep sea crabs, sea horse, baby turtles..its goes on and on. There was a gorgeous 'nemo' clownfish display and a whole collection of 'cute sea animals'; really little bright fish, baby turtles, baby sea horse and we got to pat the small sharks and rays. We also met the friendliest seal ever. Her name was chiku and she's 1 year old. We noticed her because she kept coming up to the glass and it felt like she was staring at us, then we noticed she followed your hand if you moved it...finally she followed us if we ran along the glass. She was funny and kept coming back to play for ages. She was very entertaining.
We're back chilling in the hotel room before we go out for dinner tonight. Tomorrow were planning on visiting osaka castle in the daylight.
Hope all is well, were having a fantastic time, seeing some amazing sights and trying all the tasty food :)
Much love, Jess...Mandy, Steve and Dan xxo
