Osaka

I took a trip to mainland right before Christmas and forgot to blog about it, so i'll do my best to remember what I did… I flew up there with my friend on Peach Airlines, which is a discount airline that travels out of Osaka Airport for very cheap (I think I paid about $100 round trip), and it was a short  hour and a half long flight. We took the train from the airport and arrived at Osaka Station, which has a huge shopping mall attached, and was decorated for Christmas. There were masses of people  there, which made it a little hard to enjoy, and it was freezing cold (compared to the 65 degree weather in Okinawa)! One of the main stores there reminded me of Nordstrom, it was called Hankyu, and sold everything from designer clothing, high end makeup, to gourmet food and drinks. The 2 floors of food (Japanese sweets, sake, fish of any kind, noodles, & more) were really neat to walk through but were so crowded that I couldn't really enjoy the walk!

We stayed in 2 different business hotels, which were so small that more than one person per room would have felt over crowded. The first was clean and offered a free breakfast (which included salad, spaghetti, eggs, hot dogs, bread, rice, and soup). The second was- let's just say, i didn't want to touch anything in the room and was scared for my life…….. and no free breakfast…..

We spent most of our time shopping and browsing different shopping districts and eating interesting food (okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake) and takoyaki (octopus) are especially popular in Osaka). We also made a trip to Osaka Castle, which had a light display to walk through for the holidays. Because we went at night, we couldn't explore closer to the castle but I suppose the lights were pretty cool to see anyways. They also projected a light show onto the castle which was neat.

We spent one day at Universal Studios, which i'll make a seperate post about!

 Walking around the shopping area in Namba, Osaka

Eating at a small bar in the train station