We had a very busy day planned for today due to losing a whole day to Universal Studios Osaka, the day before, we left the flat early to get to Osaka's second premium attraction, it's aquarium. You look in any tour guide/site and it'll tell you to come here, it's usually one of their top rated activities to do. We paid our 2,000 Yen (about £16) to get in. Osaka aquarium's theme is the ring of fire, all of the fish/mammals housed here come from the pacific ring of fire area. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ring_of_Fire) Upon entering the aquarium you are greeted by an impressive tunnel of fish, mainly composed of various sting rays, makes for a really great atmosphere. The aquarium itself was packed with kids, I think it's summer holidays here in Japan at the moment, so I guess the parents were just taking their kids for a day out, it was just heaving! Every time you'd try and take a picture some kid will nudge in front of you and mess your photo up! Oh well, I got some pretty good shots anyway. We saw loads of cool fish/mammals, to name a few; hammerhead shark, tuna, dolphin, seals, sea lions and stingrays among dozens of other species. The main "Tank" in the aquarium housed dozens of different species of fishes, and spanned several floors, was quite impressive, I was a bit disappointed there was no big giant shark there or a whale! They had baby sharks and some smaller whales but meh!
Grabbed a subway for lunch, I tried the steak and potato sub, was alright! The sauce was a bit crap. Set off on our way towards Umeda/Osaka, Umeda is classed as the main shopping district of Osaka, personally I saw the same kind of shops I have seen in every other built up shopping area. They had Yodabeshi and the preppy hipster shops! We headed off to the Umeda Sky Building first, to get a skyscraper view of the city, had a proper result here, it is suppose to cost like 1,000 yen (£8) to get to the observation floor, we got off on the floor below and managed to nab some photos before leaving! OK we didn't see the "floating garden" but to be honest, from what I have seen, it's hardly worth the price of admission!
From here we checked out the shops, Dan was equipped with his Pokemon shop location, but alas we couldn't find it, "Oh dear what a pity, never mind!" Springs to mind. Like I said earlier, there isn't much to post about here, wherever you go in the world, you go in one cities stores, you've been in them all. We left this area to head to HEP Five building, for those who don't know, the HEP five building, is pretty much a shopping mall with a freaking Ferris wheel built on the roof! Yes it's that cool! The shops were rubbish, high-end designer tat, double the UK counterparts! Jumped on the Ferris wheel and took some great shots of the city... even if the windows were a little grubby!
We were going to head to Osaka Castle from here but it started raining quite heavily, and Dan found the arcade.... We weren't going anywhere in a hurry! Although fair play to him, he won like 5 DragonBall "toys" at the arcade, I won 2 (IN A ROW!) One-Piece key-rings, Dan was doing so well at the arcade he even won the freaking shelf! Although they didn't give him the shelf! Basically he broke the machine, by accident!
No comments:
Post a Comment