So Saturday, Day 7 dawned to find Mom and Drew sleeping soundly in our bunks and Dad up on deck enjoying the sunrise and the final leg of the ferry cruise into Osaka harbor.
Japan is a heavily built-up country as you all know, but the Tokyo and Osaka urban areas easily dwarf the rest of the country with their expansiveness and population densities. I had been to Osaka once before, but this was my first chance to really see it, and it just seemed to go on forever.
After packing up and waiting patiently in line, we disembarked from our floating hotel and turned one last time to say goodbye to the Sunflower Ivory, the cozy little cruiser that had carried us halfway across Japan so gently during the night.
Today was officially a travel day, so our only real goal was to arrive in Kyoto by dinner time. As such, we stowed our meager belongings in a station locker and then set out on foot to see what major tourist attractions there were to see in downtown Osaka.
The first improvised destination was a place called the Hanging Gardens – this is Japan though folks, so there weren’t actually any plants, it was just a pair of really, really freaking high buildings with an awesome observation deck built between them. First you take an elevator up 40 floors or so, then you take the longest escalator I’ve ever seen in my life up to the final rim. Standing beneath it all at street level, you can see the 2 escalators here – one for traveling up, one for traveling down.
Seriously, these are reeeeeeeeally long escalators… and they have glass windows lest you forget just how high off the ground you are with nothing underneath you!
Once you get to the top you are out on a small round platform of sorts wholly exposed to the elements. This means you can walk all the way around and get an excellent panoramic view of the Kansai urban area, seeing as how the hanging gardens are pretty much in the center of things.
Not all of us present were too thrilled at being able to walk around outside so far off the ground though…
which was a shame, because we were able to spot Osaka Castle from the rooftop – look very closely at the dead center of this photograph and you’ll see it.
After our nosebleed adventure we returned down to a far more comfortable sea level… level, and headed off to find some lunch. Osaka, like virtually every city in Japan, has several foods for which it is famous. Arguably the most delicious of them is Okonomiyaki. I’m having some serious deja vu here that I’ve written about okonomiyaki in detail before, but for those of you who don’t know what it is wikipedia has a nice summary. Anyhow, one of the big themes of this trip was exposing my parents to as many different kinds of awesome Japanese food as possible, and so off we went looking for a nice okonomiyaki restaurant.
It didn’t take long to find one. Here we are sitting at our table, note the built-in grill – that’s a standard feature of any okonomiyaki restaurant.
Not wishing to sell my parents short, I ended up forgoing the menu altogether and negotiated a custom order with the owner that pretty much included any and all seafood worth eating. You can get okonomiyaki with just about any ingredients you could possibly want, but I’m of the opinion that a seafood medley of shrimp, scallops, octopus, etc. is the way to go. It doesn’t come out looking particularly delicious to the first-time eater, but one quickly learns to love the sight of a fresh okonomiyaki pie, absolutely amazing food!
After we finished our repast we headed on down what is apparently the world’s longest covered outdoor pedestrian market. Catch all that? I think it clocked in at around 2 miles of straight pedestrian walkway with stores every foot of the way.
This wasn’t anything special though, we were actually headed to Osaka Castle for our last tourist stop of the day before we headed on to Kyoto. The castle, like most in Japan, was sacked at least once during its existence and also suffered extensive bombing damage during World War 2. In reality, the only truly authentic remnants of what could be considered Osaka Castle are some absolutely awesome ramparts. Can you see the lazy kitty?
This is the main entry gate, and a reconstruction. I think the original burned down.
That’s another big threat to these old wooden buildings. It seems every other temple/castle/old building you visit in this country has burned down and been reconstructed at least once. The castle’s central tower is an impressive landmark of the Osaka skyline – those are real gold guildings. The cut stone, again, is what I found most impressive. What I never knew until we went was that the castle museum is actually inside that central tower. This means there isn’t any tour of the fuedal-era buildings, authentic or otherwise, and I found that pretty disappointing. The museum does have a nice array of armor, scrolls, and various assorted artwork so don’t let my disappointment stop you from going, but compared to a much smaller castle I visited in Kobe which had not been gutted and turned into a museum, this was low on the authenticity scale.
And that was it for our Saturday. We hopped another shinkansen to Kyoto and after a LOT of phonecalls finally took up lodging at a very nice ryokan within sight of the station. We were planning to spend 2 nights in Kyoto so after finally getting rooms on a busy holiday weekend we just grabbed a quick bite to eat at the station and then drifted off to sleep.