Day 0 of University Graduation Trip, Osaka on April 29, 2017
Despite that I mentioned in the last post, that the immigration lines at Osaka Kansai Airport were ridiculous line, so it was half past 8 in the evening when we reached our Airbnb apartment near Kuromon Ichiba Market. But since we were university students and this was still early in the night for us, so we decided to take a walk in the surroundings and there came this post of the 0-th day of our Japan trip.
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My friend "F" was also interested in taking a walk. Since it wasn't early in the night, the only area that's worth visiting at this hour was Dotonbori. (Since Detective Conan was almost my whole Japanese animation watch list, all I knew previously about Osaka was that Hattori Heiji proposed to Tōyama Kazuha on Dotonbori Bridge...)
And my taking a walk this late also had to do with Pokemon catching....
On our way from Namba Station we found quite a few of these artistic restaurants were still open.
Judging by their logo this wasn't some nice stores.
I took these photos on Nihonbashi, which seemed to be the boundary between commercial and residential Dotonbori. From here West it was a bustling commercial district that never slept.
And the handrails on Nihonbashi were flat, which meant I could place my camera for long exposures, and that's nice.
And there were quite lots of water-type Pokemons by Dotonbori River.
As a nation that invented Kasou Taishou, I wasn't surprised at all seeing these giant octopus / crab models outside stores, not until I looked closer and found their tentacles / claws to be moveable. What a people!
This should be the most famous and crowded spot of Dotonbori.
With nice-looking reflections of the Neon lights.
After spending like 40 minutes along Dotonbori River we thought it should be time for us to head back. The banks of Dotonbori River were lined with upscale restaurants so it's not that crowded, but by comparison the nearby street of Dotonbori lined with ramen restaurants and octopus meatball shops were like packed with people.
This should count as my first dinner.
Then under the advice of my friend, we decided to try out the local cuisine of Octopus Meatball.
And since those Dotonbori shops of Octopus Meatballs were located so close to the river, I wonder whether they just raised the octopus in the meatballs in the Dotonbori River closeby.
Hard to image how could a octopus be this merry while holding an octopus meatball made of its own.
An Audacious name for a dumpling shop.
This model was made of paper, and its fins weren't moveable, so it's not the nicer ones outside there.
Its limbs weren't movable, bad.
After all this, I returned to our Airbnb apartment, hungry. (It must be that my stomach wasn't used to this octopus meatball, and it wanted me to take more "conventional" food to neutralize this strangeness.) So I went to the convenience store downstairs and praised how great bento's were in Japan.
It's just I came back up and found I wasn't able to set cooking time on the microwave oven (probably because I didn't read Japanese). The final solution was that: I set it to cook "milk" in 2 minutes and 12 seconds repetition, and I count the cooking time manually. A not-so-subtle way to end a day.
END