Foodie's Heaven - Osaka
Trip Start
May 17, 2008
1
6
Trip End
May 24, 2008
Osaka,
Kinki,
Japan
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Now I'm on the plane - "China National Airline" to Osaka, the flight from Shanghai to Osaka is supposedly a mere 3 hours' flight! That's another reason why I decided to visit Japan instead of HongKong (as we originally planned), spending rougly the same amount but experincing a totally different culture.
Our eating saga continues on the plane: curry bun, soft cheese, meat and edmamme, marinated bamboo shoots, pineapple and peach, apple juice and again, a lot of beer!
American Mura
! Unlike all US airlines, Chinese airlines are much more generous regarding meal serving while still operating economically.We landed!! Out of the plane, CLEAN is my first impression of Osaka.
We made a huge mistake afterwards: choosing to take a cab to the city center of Osaka rather than taking the train, which costs nothing. Well, the cab cost a fortune: 165 USD! We didn't realize that until we are 3/4 away from the destination. $100 more than we should have paid :(( A handsome penalty that later forced us to take bus all the time to make up for the loss :((
The cabs in Japan are mostly black decoration inside with white knit covers on black leather seats - same neat black suits of each driver with white gloves! Seamless matching on dustless taxis!!
There's an automatic meter in front of every cab that picks up toll automatically while passing on the highway, saving a lot of time and costs. We were amazed.
The meter jumped crazily in front of us: 12320, 14060, 15280...we dropped our jaws when it finally arrived at the city: 16500 yen!
Big Crab
! We knew it's not a good sign when there's no trace of a city coming up on the highway when the cab meter reads 13000. We stayed at "River Nankai Hotel".
In the hall, we found a vending machine selling everything from underwear to Asahi beers. Droping everything off the room, we departed to explore the city immediately.
First was America-mura, from the States, we were certainly curious to see how the Japanese teenagers copied every American style into their life: here, young people crazily mimic everything from the US, from fashion to hairstyle, from the gadgets to how they act, everything was about how great America is. On the famous triangle plaza, KT Tunstall was singing with all enthusiasm on a 80-100" LCD screen. In front of the screen, all Japanese younsters were dancing while wearing casual jeans and t-shirts, with all their hair dyed in red or golden.
I was, rather, attracted by an interesting small store opposite the plaza "Jia He Liu", a store famous for its Osakan octupus balls. Without hesitation I bought 6 balls with 300 yen. Scott and I shared that box with whole heart's content: delicious! It's a ball mingled with minced octupus meat, cheese and cheese again :) worth the trying!
The real Japanese experience for us, didn't start until we arrived at Dontonbori, a famous downtown district of Osaka with hundreds of restaurants and bars alongside one single road
Orange juice from vending machine
. Here, tourirsts mixed with locals, with the same excited expression, trying to absorb everything they saw and kept the memory forever. After taking some pictures underneath the symbolic big crab and running sportsman, we decided to settle down in a small Japanese style restaurant with nothing we could recognize on the menu. Even I knew all what the Kanji characters mean, but the arrangement still bewildered me greatly. We were totally lost: all we could do was to copy our neighbours' order, amused our waitress greatly. She later led me to the front of the door and I had to order by the look of the dish in the display window. On the menu, there were things like "handsome boy", "green tang", "dolphin meat" (later discovered as pork!), "sea old" (that was shrimp!)...it was really funny. We had a very strange combination of food but still had a very good time :)))
