Day 6: Osaka 3 Den Den Town

For our last day in Osaka, we decided to take it easy. A sleep-in & leisurely start to the morning.

A sit-down breakfast...

Location: Deli Cafe, in Osaka station
Food:
1. Dee - Beef Volcano Bun + Hard-boiled egg
2. Rah - selection of sandwiches
Drink: Salt Caramel au lait - very interesting taste, dee was waiting for the coffee to kick in until i told her there was none in the drink 4/5
Beef bun: interesting construction 3.5/5
sandwiches: a nice selection, egg was nice 3.5/5

Den Den Town (formally known as Nipponbashi):
This is the equivalent of Akihabara (of Tokyo) in Osaka. Consists mainly of electronics, anime/manga, & collectibles stores, Dee & Rah made up nearly the entirety of the female population on that street. After passing many stores containing items that we couldn't really buy anyway, we stumbled into the collectibles section of the street..... & proceded to spend many hrs trawling the stores, to re-emerge with new guitar/mini/ff/haro models. (where guitar=guitar, mini=mini cooper, ff= final fantasy, haro=character from gundam, image from google below).


Lunch:
We realised at 2pm that we hadn't had lunch yet... & stumbled into a sushi place on that street (name unknown).

Location: Den Den Town/Nipponbashi
Food: Salmon Ikura Don (ie salmon & salmon roe on rice)

For Y700, this value is incredible and hard to beat. A big bowl of hot rice, topped with about 7 LARGE pieces (meaning each piece is 4-5X typical Sydney sashimi size) of fresh salmon about 7mm thick. Huge amount of salmon roe on top. Add soya sauce and wasabi. Hot tea and miso soup (a bit strange tasting) also served. YUM.

At this local stand up bar, no one spoke an ounce of english. It didn't matter it was stand up- we demolished the huge bowl in 5 minutes flat. Again to iterate- YUM. 8/10 for food.
9/10 reflective of price.

After lunch, it was a bit of shopping & then off to our long train journey to Nagano (as a stop-over to our ultimate destination of Yamanouchi - the town with the snow monkeys).

Snack: Melon Pan Ice

While waiting for the train, Rah found a vending machine selling ice-cream, of which one was Melon Pan Ice - ie Melon pan (aka one of rah's fav foods) in ice-cream style! Yum! 4/5

Dinner: Eki-ben
Ekiben, or railway boxed meals, are a specific type of bento box, sold on trains and train stations around Japan. Thank you, Mr Wikipedia. Mr Wikipedia shares that "The "Golden Age" of ekiben, however, ended three decades ago." ... sure, thanks! We got our Ekiben from the Daimaru basement at Umeda station in Osaka - a final goodbye!

Fig 1.1: Dee's Ekiben (L) and Rah's Ekiben (R), being consumed on the bullet train.
(1) Dee's = Eel, potato salad, assorted pickles with pretty mushroom, tamago (egg) with tofu, lotus root, prawn.
I chose this Ekiben because I suddenly felt I had been stuffed with carbs - rice and rice and ramen and udon and rice... hopefully its all fixed now! Being on a moving vehicle, my brain turns off and I automatically go into sleep mode, so I really didn't think about my food. It was probably a 5 or 6/10 overall.

(2) Rah = Pork on rice, fish, tamago, pumpkin, potato salad.
Fish was a little too salty but the rest was quite nice. I will say 7/10.

Day 4: Kobe 1

Today we ventured to the far-away city of Kobe... a whole 30min train ride away....

Breakfast:

Location: a nice bakery on the way to the station.
Most popular food: saku saku MELON PAN! one of Clara's favourite things food-wise. it's bread with cookie dough on top, sometimes flavoured with melon (ie honeydew-like melon) flaouring. this one had sugar sprinkled on top of it. YUM =)! 4/5

Task 2: finding the ShinKobe Ropeway to get to a viewing platform & the herb garden.
MAJOR fail, after wandering the station lost, we asked the nice lady @ the visitor information to find out that it's closed for renovation....

Task 2, take 2: visiting Western houses dotted around Kobe.
Background: Kobe is a big port and business center of Japan. Particularly, it used to attract lots of expatriates and hence the culture is a little more westernised.
This included houses with names such as "The English House" & "The Club of Excellent", & appeared to all have been converted to wedding places.... quite a nice walk, until torrential rain came down on us.
luckily Clara brought an umbrella. unfortunately, this umbrella had lived inside a suitcase for the better part of the last 3 years & hadn't been tested. it majorly died in its final battle with the rain, leaving us partially soaked, to be saved by a conveniently placed Family Mart, stocking many 500yen umbrellas.
We are now proud owners of a VERY japanesey see through umbrella.
For example, we can death glare at everyone through our umbrella.

Lunch: Kobe beef ... in Kobe

"IKE-SOMETHING-YA-DAI"
(There is one character we don't know how to read. The word for run in chinese.)
Location: Sannomiya
Kobe beef is somewhat pricey to say the least. But we absolutely HAD to eat it. After all, thats why Dee insisted on going to Kobe. Its like a special breed of black Wagyu cattle. Popular belief has it that they are fed beer and massaged in sake daily, but Wiki disproved this fact much to my dismay.
We decided to try find Kobe beef for lunch, as these sets are generally cheaper than dinner by at least 2/3rds. Wandering around the station after the torrential rain, we decided to sit down to dry off. We covered at least 300m of shops and restaurants before finally choosing this one - and it as a good choice!
Food: Kobe Beef Set
1. Nine starters arranged 3X3 on a square tray, the central point being the chawamushi with cute little mushrooms.
2. Five decent bites of Kobe beef on a hot plate, with special rice and miso soup.
Kobe beef is tasty. very tasty. The way beef should be - rich and beefy.
I'm glad we didnt fork out for a full steak as the taste would have probably been overwhelming.
The starters were brilliant and showed off an array of cooking styles. We polished off all the starters and during our eating of the beef they brought us each another 8 starters (minus the chawamushi)... thats insane!! we couldn't finish it all. Clara said that at some restaurants they keep refilling if you empty the whole plate.
10/10 for experience, variety and refilling of amazing food. YUMO.

Between meal stop 1: The Hakutsuru Sake Brewery Museum
Luckily after lunch, it had stopped raining & we made our way to the only sake brewery in the area (famous for them) to have free entry & free sake tasting, why wouldn't we have chosen this one? After learning about the making of sake - which seemed to consist of pouring rice/beaten rice/liquid from one container to another container & repeat over & over again, - we proceeded to (accidentally) trick the ppl into giving us multiple samples of the tasting sake.
don't worry, we didn't get drunk. Despite strong taste, sake is usually only about 12% alcohomol.


Between meal stop 2: UCC coffee museum

Incredibly rushed for time today, plus this wasn't in our itinerary. Yet, how could we pass up the opportunity to visit a Coffee Museum when Dee spotted it on the tourist map?? We wizzed through 6 (small) levels and learnt about coffee bean growth, distribution, roasting, processing, brewing... the information was endless. Thankfully they only translated about 1% of endless into English. At the end, Clara and I had to do a computer quiz on the museum, which was incredibly hard considering above. We then went to a photo booth for our picture to be printed on a commemorative certificate. If we got 5/5 we'd be "Great Doctorate of Coffee". I guess we'll just have to be content with our MBBS's for now.

Snack: Waffle

Location: Sannomiya Station outside Port Liner
Waffles are good. Belgium waffles even better.
Waffle shop with big line is good. Especially if consistent over 2 periods of observation in same day. Add chocolate- very good.
After lining up for 15 minutes most people bought boxes to take home or as gifts.
The man serving us had to triple check that the two of us just wanted ONE (language barrier anyone?).
Unfortunately cold, would've been better hot.
And if we were actually in Belgium.

Dinner

Dinner was alright. Not much to say.
Was too tired to pay much notice (shock horror!).
Clara had curry udon. It was nice.
Filling enough to recharge us for standing in line for the next 2 hours.

Kobe Luminarie
Somehow we managed to make it into a city during a time when a festival was actually happening. Kobe Luminarie is a festival of lights which is gifted by Italy every year following the Kobe earthquake to give them hope.


Task 1: finding the end of the line to get into the event. It seemed that half the city's roads was closed off just for the lines.
(try not to lose Denise)
Task 2: photo-ing & enjoying the lights - nice!
(try to remind Denise not to wander off)
Task 3: follow our noses to the food:
(Denise will be at food)
so it seemed that this was a festival proper, with endless stalls of food (like any good japanese festival), we went round & round & ate a (small) selection of them, we even found shaker fries for Denise (one of Dee's fav things EVER). If only we had known about the food before we ate dinner.



Conclusion: we LOVE Japanese festivals.