Photos are finially up!

Day 14 - Osaka Castle and Kyoto

We were suppose to do Osaka Castle the day before, but time constraints and the crappy weather made it a challenge to accomplish, checked out of the hostel early..ish! (Another good hostel, not quite as nice as the Tokyo one, but would still recommend it to anyone heading to Osaka, it's real easy to find from the Fukushima Station in Osaka and the staff are really helpful! And also Mr Yano is an amazing Japanese person to drink with!) We left our bags in the safe room before heading towards the castle. The weather was quite unpredictable again today, heavy humid showers! Fun! Walked to the castle from the train station, it's about a mile away, not too far, although in hindsight we should have got on that "train" that goes to the castle. Anyway, the castle is quite a feat, it looks spectacular and has an intriguing back story, which is played out throughout the museum. Got some great pictures of the castle (at some point you'll see!)

Headed back to the hostel to get the bags, left to Osaka station, first thing I noticed when we got to the JR station was a large Pokemon display right next to the building apparently housing the Pokemon shop, we didn't check it out as it was already late afternoon. Hopped on a JR train to Kyoto.

The first thing I really notice about Kyoto, is how different it is to Tokyo/Osaka, it's not as built up as the more populated cities, you see no end of pagoda's and shrines whilst on the train, but no giant shopping centres or housing complexes to the extent the other cities has, it's almost like Kyoto has been left behind. For those who didn't know this use to be the capital of Japan up until 1869, and it wasn't a target during the World War ll bombing raids, that's why a lot of the prewar buildings and shrines are still standing.

Anyway, we get off the train and instantly we have no idea where we are suppose to be going in regards to the new hostel, so we hop into a cab, and you know you're in trouble when even he doesn't know where to go! Never the less, we found the hostel in no time, it's around a 15 minute walk from the station, but if you don't know where you are, you'll easily get lost, as it's hidden down various side streets. This hostel has a very different feel to it, it's a "backpacker" hostel, it caters to a lot more people than previously encountered, and they all appear to be English or American, this isn't a bad thing, but it's not the same as the other hostels whereas you were interacting with the locals and they were showing you their customs. There seem to be a lot of students here spending my taxes! Even the receptionist spoke fluent English, although to be honest, he was a lot of help when it came to planning my temple hop for tomorrow!

There isn't much more to post about, after we got settled, we walked around Kyoto, trying to get our bearings, there isn't much in the area... apart from a Yodabeshi Camera! Meh! We found a local shrine called Higashi Hongashi but it was closed, so we couldn't really explore it. Crashed earlyish! Going to be up early to travel around Kyoto!

Day 14 - Osaka Castle and Kyoto

We were suppose to do Osaka Castle the day before, but time constraints and the crappy weather made it a challenge to accomplish, checked out of the hostel early..ish! (Another good hostel, not quite as nice as the Tokyo one, but would still recommend it to anyone heading to Osaka, it's real easy to find from the Fukushima Station in Osaka and the staff are really helpful! And also Mr Yano is an amazing Japanese person to drink with!) We left our bags in the safe room before heading towards the castle. The weather was quite unpredictable again today, heavy humid showers! Fun! Walked to the castle from the train station, it's about a mile away, not too far, although in hindsight we should have got on that "train" that goes to the castle. Anyway, the castle is quite a feat, it looks spectacular and has an intriguing back story, which is played out throughout the museum. Got some great pictures of the castle (at some point you'll see!)

Headed back to the hostel to get the bags, left to Osaka station, first thing I noticed when we got to the JR station was a large Pokemon display right next to the building apparently housing the Pokemon shop, we didn't check it out as it was already late afternoon. Hopped on a JR train to Kyoto.

The first thing I really notice about Kyoto, is how different it is to Tokyo/Osaka, it's not as built up as the more populated cities, you see no end of pagoda's and shrines whilst on the train, but no giant shopping centres or housing complexes to the extent the other cities has, it's almost like Kyoto has been left behind. For those who didn't know this use to be the capital of Japan up until 1869, and it wasn't a target during the World War ll bombing raids, that's why a lot of the prewar buildings and shrines are still standing.

Anyway, we get off the train and instantly we have no idea where we are suppose to be going in regards to the new hostel, so we hop into a cab, and you know you're in trouble when even he doesn't know where to go! Never the less, we found the hostel in no time, it's around a 15 minute walk from the station, but if you don't know where you are, you'll easily get lost, as it's hidden down various side streets. This hostel has a very different feel to it, it's a "backpacker" hostel, it caters to a lot more people than previously encountered, and they all appear to be English or American, this isn't a bad thing, but it's not the same as the other hostels whereas you were interacting with the locals and they were showing you their customs. There seem to be a lot of students here spending my taxes! Even the receptionist spoke fluent English, although to be honest, he was a lot of help when it came to planning my temple hop for tomorrow!

There isn't much more to post about, after we got settled, we walked around Kyoto, trying to get our bearings, there isn't much in the area... apart from a Yodabeshi Camera! Meh! We found a local shrine called Higashi Hongashi but it was closed, so we couldn't really explore it. Crashed earlyish! Going to be up early to travel around Kyoto!

 

Day 13 - Osaka Aquarium and Umeda district.

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!

 

Day 13 - Osaka Aquarium and Umeda district.

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!

 

Day 12 - Universal Studios Osaka!

Another unprecedented change to the itinerary! We checked the weather forecast Wednesday night and it looked like rain for Friday so we swapped the days around. I thought we were going to oversleep today as we were quite smashed last night, and we didn't set an alarm, but we did well!

Anyway hangover free, we left towards "Universal City Station" to get into Universal Studios, before we went in, I was a bit sceptical about the idea of going to this place in Osaka, knowing that it'd be stupidly expensive and in Japanese! And whilst both of these statements are true, we did have an awesome time! It cost us 6,200 Yen, each, to get in, (about £50!) I'm a man of value, so I said to myself, lets see a few rides/shows to at least justify the ticket price, I thought it would be impossible to get some value on this ticket seeing how busy it was, it was heaving! Weather wise, it easily peaked 35 degrees earlier! 

First thing we did upon entering the theme park was check out the Terminator 2 - 3D "show," we were all ushered into a room, and this woman in red started talking (in Japanese obviously) about her company "Cyberdyne" eventually all hell breaks loose and we get a show with a Japanese John Connor! It was quite cool.

After that we saw the Spiderman ride, another of my favourites, you go in a car and it you get "thrown" about by 3D animations, it was so amazing I went on it four times! Each time it only took like 2 minutes of queueing! We worked out an easy way of jumping the queue at Universal Studios Osaka, they have two lines, 1 for groups, and 1 for singles, unless you actually wanna sit next to your friend you can literally jump to the front of the queue every time!

Back To The Future was after this, personally I hated this ride, in comparison to all the others I went on in the day, this really showed it's age, and didn't really have the "oomph" that the others offered, they had a full scale delorean outside which Dan loved!

Other notable shows/rides we saw, Waterworld show, this was amazing! I only got the gist of this because it had a lot of talking in it, but the choreography and stunts were great fun, basically, some guys were holding out this little fort, some other dudes break in, some fighting, killing and awesome scenes later lead to applause all round! The Jurassic Park ride was pretty cool as well, nostalgic and scary at the same time! Managed to get utterly drenched at the end as well. Jaws and Backdraft were alright, a bit boring to begin with, but picked up for the finale! There were various street performers doing the rounds, I think it was to do with Universal Studio Osaka's 10 year anniversary.

There were quite a few "theme" restaurants to try out, we chose the Jurassic Park one, which was crap to be honest, the price was quite reasonable, about £11 for the whole meal, but the quality of said meal was just not there! it was a "Dinosaur" steak, sausage on a bone, vegetable rice and baked potato! It was all edible, but was just rubbish! (Almost on par with my in flight meal!)

The thing that I was amazed with throughout my day, was that the worked all seemed so enthusiastic, whether it be a tour guide on the Jaws ride, a drinks server, a cleaner or even performer, they all just seemed so happy and full of life, I don't think I've ever experienced a place in England whereas everyone within the establishment is as happy as can be, without it seeming false. (Well except for Bankers then!)

I picked up a really bad ass Cookie Monster plush from the gift shop, among some other presents, I was gutted not to find the keyring I was after, but meh! Life goes on!  Busy day tomorrow, last full day in Osaka, hopefully going to Osaka aquarium, Osaka Castle, HEP Five building, Umeda Sky Building and Den Den Town (Nipponbashi) if we have time that is!

Day 11 - Osaka - The first izakaya!

We left Tokyo around 9am, to get out JR Exchange Order changed into a JR Pass, so we can ride *some* JR run lines around Japan (costs like £209 per week, but it pays for itself after going to Osaka and back to Tokyo!) 

I won't bore you with the travel stuff! We got on the bullet train, it was a Shinkansen train, not quite the Nozomi (the fastest of the bullet trains) but oh well!

We arrived at our station Fukushima, Osaka a little after 2pm, we couldn't check in till 3pm so we just strolled around, it was immensely hot today, to the point where I single handedly bankrolled most of Osaka's vending machines. Once we were checked in, we were told about a party that night, or izakaya, basically, an izakaya is a place where people go to drink, but they serve food, not like pubs back home, more like occasional nibbles! It cost us like 2,000 yen to go, and it was a great laugh, we were chilling with some like minded people, some students and travellers. We drank and ate a lot of amazing Japanese cuisine (Sushimi, Tofu, Eggplant and Sake! springs to mind!) We left there to go to the local Karaoke bar. Karaoke was great fun, not quite as good as when we went with Aaron and G-rat, mainly because their systems were rubbish! But when you're drunk and singing along to Nothing Else Matters and Bittersweet Symphony with good company, can you ask for more?

Day 12 - Universal Studios Osaka!

Another unprecedented change to the itinerary! We checked the weather forecast Wednesday night and it looked like rain for Friday so we swapped the days around. I thought we were going to oversleep today as we were quite smashed last night, and we didn't set an alarm, but we did well!

Anyway hangover free, we left towards "Universal City Station" to get into Universal Studios, before we went in, I was a bit sceptical about the idea of going to this place in Osaka, knowing that it'd be stupidly expensive and in Japanese! And whilst both of these statements are true, we did have an awesome time!

It cost us 6,200 Yen, each, to get in, (about £50!) I'm a man of value, so I said to myself, lets see a few rides/shows to at least justify the ticket price, I thought it would be impossible to get some value on this ticket seeing how busy it was, it was heaving! Weather wise, it easily peaked 35 degrees earlier! 

First thing we did upon entering the theme park was check out the Terminator 2 - 3D "show," we were all ushered into a room, and this woman in red started talking (in Japanese obviously) about her company "Cyberdyne" eventually all hell breaks loose and we get a show with a Japanese John Connor! It was quite cool.

After that we saw the Spiderman ride, another of my favourites, you go in a car and it you get "thrown" about by 3D animations, it was so amazing I went on it four times! Each time it only took like 2 minutes of queueing! We worked out an easy way of jumping the queue at Universal Studios Osaka, they have two lines, 1 for groups, and 1 for singles, unless you actually wanna sit next to your friend you can literally jump to the front of the queue every time!

Back To The Future was after this, personally I hated this ride, in comparison to all the others I went on in the day, this really showed it's age, and didn't really have the "oomph" that the others offered, they had a full scale delorean outside which Dan loved!

Other notable shows/rides we saw, Waterworld show, this was amazing! I only got the gist of this because it had a lot of talking in it, but the choreography and stunts were great fun, basically, some guys were holding out this little fort, some other dudes break in, some fighting, killing and awesome scenes later lead to applause all round! The Jurassic Park ride was pretty cool as well, nostalgic and scary at the same time! Managed to get utterly drenched at the end as well. Jaws and Backdraft were alright, a bit boring to begin with, but picked up for the finale! There were various street performers doing the rounds, I think it was to do with Universal Studio Osaka's 10 year anniversary.

There were quite a few "theme" restaurants to try out, we chose the Jurassic Park one, which was crap to be honest, the price was quite reasonable, about £11 for the whole meal, but the quality of said meal was just not there! it was a "Dinosaur" steak, sausage on a bone, vegetable rice and baked potato! It was all edible, but was just rubbish! (Almost on par with my in flight meal!)

The thing that I was amazed with throughout my day, was that the worked all seemed so enthusiastic, whether it be a tour guide on the Jaws ride, a drinks server, a cleaner or even performer, they all just seemed so happy and full of life, I don't think I've ever experienced a place in England whereas everyone within the establishment is as happy as can be, without it seeming false. (Well except for Bankers then!)

I picked up a really bad ass Cookie Monster plush from the gift shop, among some other presents, I was gutted not to find the keyring I was after, but meh! Life goes on! 

Busy day tomorrow, last full day in Osaka, hopefully going to Osaka aquarium, Osaka Castle, HEP Five building, Umeda Sky Building and Den Den Town (Nipponbashi) if we have time that is!

Day 11 - Osaka - The first izakaya!

We left Tokyo around 9am, to get out JR Exchange Order changed into a JR Pass, so we can ride *some* JR run lines around Japan (costs like £209 per week, but it pays for itself after going to Osaka and back to Tokyo!) 

I won't bore you with the travel stuff! We got on the bullet train, it was a Shinkansen train, not quite the Nozomi (the fastest of the bullet trains) but oh well!

We arrived at our station Fukushima, Osaka a little after 2pm, we couldn't check in till 3pm so we just strolled around, it was immensely hot today, to the point where I single handedly bankrolled most of Osaka's vending machines. Once we were checked in, we were told about a party that night, or izakaya, basically, an izakaya is a place where people go to drink, but they serve food, not like pubs back home, more like occasional nibbles! It cost us like 2,000 yen to go, and it was a great laugh, we were chilling with some like minded people, some students and travellers. We drank and ate a lot of amazing Japanese cuisine (Sushimi, Tofu, Eggplant and Sake! springs to mind!) We left there to go to the local Karaoke bar. Karaoke was great fun, not quite as good as when we went with Aaron and G-rat, mainly because their systems were rubbish! But when you're drunk and singing along to Nothing Else Matters and Bittersweet Symphony with good company, can you ask for more?