Day - 9 Walking and Exploring Japan : Osaka, Dotonbori

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Day 9: Osaka: Woke up feeling like I had been punched in the guts by the Fire Ramen chef in my sleep. I think the copious amount of ramen we have been eating has started catching up on me. Luckily we are only in Japan for another week, so my body should be able to hold together until Sunday if we do desire to eat Ramen every day... Because we totally can/could/should.

LAND OF THE FREE. HOME OF THE BRAVE.

Packed up and headed to the station to begin our trip to Osaka.

Kyoto station.

train

Protip: Shinkansen from Kyoto to Osaka is overkill. In the time it took us to get to Kyoto station and get our tickets from the JR office, we could have possibly already reached Osaka-umeda.

Waffles and coffee for the Thunderbird Shinkansen.

Protip 2: a lot of stations share part of their name. When you say Osaka, you could be referring to 3 stations. Some of which are on the same line.

Protip 3: in Kyoto and Osaka you have to put money into the ticket machine before being able to select a fare bracket.

Protip 4: sub-express and limited-express are two different things. Look at the dots on the map.
Etc Etc.

Anyway, we ended up getting different trains to Osaka, which resulted in us trying to work out where we were, where we were going and what the hell trains stopped locally across the several lines offered.

Protip 5: google directions are terrible but are better than seeing your station whizz past. Take the time penalty, damn it. TAKE IT.

After an entire afternoon of frustrating train and street navigation, we reached our airbnb, where I carried the bags up to the 5F. I saw a TV, turned it on and fell asleep while watching Japanese TV.

Osaka.

Woke up at 7:30pm... Decided to go out to see what the fuss was about in Dotonbori. Dotonbori is like Shinjuku... If everything was food related. So many Street food vendors operating out of restaurants. So many restaurants. So many bars. So many lights and animatronic crabs. Ended up eating at a.. Japanese Steakhouse? It was beef tongue and like.. 8 sauces. Pretty good.