Osaka

Our next country is Japan 🇯🇵 We started our journey in Osaka, a large port city of approximately 2,6 million inhabitants located on the main island of Honshu.

We joined a Free Walking tour on our first day. The guide unfortunately wasn’t good. He did not share much information about the city, but we loved walking around the busiest streets of the town with all the people and lights. It was such a huge contrast to Port Barton 😅 In the afternoon we walked on our own towards Denden Town: the city's electronics, games, and anime shopping neighborhood, also famous for its maid cafes (a place where girls dress up as maids; it’s mostly a place where people go to have company). It was interesting to see the immense variety of figurines, cards, and toys one can collect, and we got a bit nostalgic when we entered some retro video game shops 🤓

We also had our first experience with Gachapon. These capsule toys vending machines are all over Japan. This day marked the beginning of a big love story with those machines… 😂 and the start of a delicious culinary journey. Okonomiyaki for lunch (a Japanese pancake made of wheat flour batter mixed with cabbage and in our case seafood) and ramen for dinner were our first highlights🥘🤤

The next day we had a look at Osaka castle (dated from the 16th-century that has undergone several restorations), and spent the afternoon in Nakazakinishi district, a great neighborhood with lots of vintage, 2nd hand shops and cozy cafes. It was less crowded than the city center and we could enjoy our first matcha latte 🍵 and Takoyaki (grilled balls of batter made with flour and eggs filled with octopus), yummy! 🤤

We then decided to spend a full day in Nara, actually at Nara park. Nara is located less than an hour away from Osaka and was Japan’s first permanent capital. The park is home to several historic temples and shrines, and thousands of “famous” deers 🦌
Deer crackers are for sale around the park, and some deer have learned to bow to visitors to ask to be fed 😅

Few of them were a bit insisting to get crackers but most of them were really cute 🥰
Since it was raining the day after, we enjoyed visiting some of the numerous malls, went to a retro gaming bar and a sake bar near our place. We were the only foreigners and had a sake tasting there. The bartender and the 3 other customers were super nice, trying their best to communicate with us with google translation 😃

On our last day, we went to Universal Studios 🎢 We were super lucky as we got lottery tickets in the morning to enter the Super Nintendo World part of the park, that has normally to be booked two months in advance. We also went to the Jurassic Park, the Harry Potter, and the Minions parts. We had a lot of fun (and fear lol) and managed to do almost all thrilling rollercoasters of the park 🤗
Osaka was a great start to explore Japan and we liked the city a lot 🥰 It left us so thrilled and excited as there is so much to discover and do 👾Leer más