Osaka
We spent an amazing 36 days in Japan! We did a lot of traveling, and we went back and forth between a lot of locations, cities, and districts. To make things easier to read and write, we have grouped everything in our travels into city locations and not exactly by time. The Japan list of contents so far can be found here!
Our stay in Osaka was not an easy one to plan. 3 months before we were meant to leave America for Japan we had sent a follow up email to our Osaka host, who had unfortunatly "forgotten" about us. We talked more about the issue in here, in, "Plans go Awry". To keep a long story short, however, we were supposed to stay in the place that looked like this.
What we ended up in was a place that looked like this -
The apartment complex was brand new, and still in the center of the city, but to be honest was not what we had wanted. The beds were all twin size, made for children, and the blankets matched. We eventually had to text the host to bring us new blankets because the ones they had provided barely covered our adult bodies.
Luckily, we didn't come to Osaka to sleep all day, and venturing out into the city was an interesting experience.
One of our major interests in Osaka was to see an Owl Cafe, where you can go to purchase a cup of coffee or tea and see different owls in a room with you, almost like a petting zoo, but for owls. They have many different kind of these cafe's in Japan, some for dogs, some for cats, even some for rabbits. Our interest were owls though.
The experience was an interesting one, but we would never go again. It is obvious that it is more of a money making venture than a zoo, where animals would be provided proper care and time away from humans. It was a bit hard to participate in after realizing what exactly was going on. Many of the owls seems restless, as they were confined to their branches, and while there were many signs on the walls asking for no flash to be used in photography, many of the tourist ignored the signs, flashing lights at the owls inches from their faces. These are night creatures, so the daylight alone was harsh enough for them. We left shortly after arrival, uncomfortable with the situation.
Pablo, was discussed in our previous post, Harajuka, Osaka was actually where we first ran into it. Due to the nature of the order I decided to write these posts in.
On the other hand. Perhaps you have seen this before, as it was one time popular gif on the internet, Walking down the streets of Osaka, we saw them!
Osaka was a fascinating place, and worth a visit. We stayed for 3 nights/4 days. I would only recommend one night, at the most 2. We found ourselves a bit restless in the city, with not much to see or do, that we hadn't already seen or done in Kyoto or Tokyo.
When we left Osaka our actual destination was back to Kyoto, where we continued our adventure in Tsubara House. We landed in Kyoto Station and wanted to try the famous Ramen Iroha.
