160513 Doubutsuen-mae

so.. we were supposed to go kyoto today but mr k settled in so late the previous day we ended up going to a nearby district instead, called doubutsuen-mae (literally front of zoo). not that we were going to the zoo.
we had our breakfast at osaka dome, where there's a supermarket at the basement and you can just buy all the goodies to eat at the free tables. there's also an oven to heat things up.

we walked in the wrong direction after exiting the station and took a good while to get back to where we were before realising it was actually just in front of us. the tower was blocked by the big pachinko mall but you could actually see it if you take a few more steps back =_=

gotta love all these big colorful shop fronts.

look at the portion they are selling...

i made mr k sit next to it to reference the size. the pudding is as big as the face...

here's the tower we see in the distance.

the tower is supposed to look better at night but we came too early

and just a street down there's an alley with lots of food... and the trending lover's lock spread.

there's a baduk club too whoo

after looking around we settled at the place with the longest queue. this place is supposed to be famous for their deep-fried sticks.

so you just pick on the ingredients you want, and they deep fry it for you. then you dip it into the sauce next to it (only once). 

when we left it was nearing night!

and then we headed to namba again to find foodies.. heard there was a lot of famous stuff we missed out on the first day so we revisited the streets.

first up, famous custard! the skin is so crispy!!! as mr k says, it usually has a queue but i guess we were lucky today.

then we have the famous cheese cake! fresh from the oven. it was going 'boing-boing' when it came out, like a wobbling pudding. we ate it at home, and it was so soft and spongy. you can actually eat the whole cake yourself as it's not very 'thick'

look at the queue...

we then went for our official dinner - how can we not have sushi in japan!

had the fixed set at about 8-9k yen. i'm always amazed at how big the topping is that you don't see the rice.

some additional ones to fill mr k's tummy.

we tried to locate this bra shop i had my eyes on and after walking a few rounds, failed to find it so we returned home for dragon blaze. T_T

the next half of the day was back to osaka - namba shopping!

we kinda weaved through the entire area since we didn't know where it starts and where it ends.



ooh accessorize

and when we got lost, we can just hop on the nearest subway and go to wherever (since it's free heh).
there's a nipponbashi here and a nihonbashi in tokyo (same kanjis though... wth)



takarakuji (lottery in japan)


a theatre

subway sandwich

interesting building. it looks like a ride though

getting free coffee at mac





a very pretty kabuki-za (i think?)
[IMG]http://i282.photobucket.com/albums/kk266/peripherals23/Osaka%20230508/1%20Namba/6a2e29f3.jpg[/IMG]


huge tako!


osaka's specialty, takoyaki. the price gets cheaper as you go down the street... this was like one of the more expensive stalls (-_-`)


huge kani




(cheapest) kani stick there heh

see sonic?

cute signboards




lots of fancy takoyaki and okonomiyaki combination


ate this konomiyaki (another osaka specialty)




japan's pet shops are full of baby dogs and cats!!

black market

den-den town (like akihabara)


costumes

and when we went home later...

seems like f4's pretty popular here. (-_-`)

back at osaka, we finally took a ferris wheel - the one on top of the building!


shops in the mall


the attendants refused to help us take photo using our own cameras :(

(in the end they went to develop the photo they helped us take uing their own camera but it was too ugly so we didn't buy it hahaah)


view as we slowly traverse to the top





and taying on a bit more after we got out

doing strange things...

food shops back in the mall again.

waffles!

and about a metre long ice cream

then it was time to board the night bus back to tokyo... and guess what, we couldn't find the lockers where we'd put our stuff at. we ran around the whole place asking people where the excelsior cafe was, but the japanese don't seem to know what that cafe is! (must be our pronounciation or their english sucks) and we couldn't find the exit 4 (found 3,5,6 but not 4 - heaven must be playing with us). when we fially found it (there was NO indication of the exit's number, we just headed down the one we felt is most similarly located to the map we had), and reached the place we were supposed to gather at, it was 9.59pm (1 minute early, thank goodness). it was like we were on amazing race...
the bus ride that night was quite horrible because we didn't each get to have 2 seats like the other day, so we squeezed like mad.