Japan trip day 16: Kyoto (July 31st, 2009)

(Friday)

We visited Osaka in order to visit 3 places: the floating garden observatory, the Osaka aquarium, and Osaka's Doguya-suji arcade (to buy plastic food models). I bought a combined free-ride ticket and aquarium entrance ticket, which are especially cheap on Fridays.

We first went to the Floating Garden Observatory (or Umeda Sky Building). It was hot and humid on the way to the observatory. We went to the top observation deck, but Dan and Dorit stayed below in the air-conditioned observation gallery below. I took Shirley and Rena to the observation deck. The view was not special. This is a famous spot for young couples at night, but when we visited it it was almost empty. I do not know why it is called "floating garden", because there was no garden to be seen on the top of the building. The ascent through the glass elevator and the glass-walled escalator was nice.

I later found out that the basement of the floating garden observatory had many restaurants arranged in a replica of an old Japanese market street. We should have eaten lunch there. It was not mentioned in my Frommer's guide, but it was mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide.

We ate lunch in an Italian restaurant on the 7th floor of a nearby mall. We visited many restaurants until we found one with an English menu and no smoking guests. My pasta was mediocre. Dorit and Rena enjoyed their pizza.

We took the subway to Doguya-shji arcade in Minami. Dorit, Shirely and Rena stayed in the underground shopping arcade. Dan and I visited the kitchen supply stores. It was much smaller than Tokyo's Kappabashi-dori and more cramped. We did not find any plastic food models, but Dan found a store selling chopsticks (among other things). This shop had more than 100 different styles of chopsticks. Dan bought a few chopsticks for his friends, and I bought two boxes containing two sets of chopsticks each as gifts. I also bought very nice chopsticks for Dan. We bought enough chopstick rests for every chopstick pair.

When we came back to Dorit and the girls, Shirley did not feel well, so we returned to the hotel. The Shinkansen took about 20 minutes to cover the distance from Osaka to Kyoto.

Lessons learnt: do not buy a combination pass and an entrance ticket for an attraction unless you visit the attraction first. In our case, we did not visit the Osaka Aquarium that day, so the entrance ticket expired.