Notes from Wednesday May 9 2023: But first it’s time to say good-bye to the very comfy Strings Intercontinental Hotel. On the one hand it’s a huge generic corporate space, kinda boring to choose in a foreign country, but it was in a great location and I kind of like having the comforts of home for the first couple of nights in a strange place.
Yesterday’s sick uni extravaganza of a breakfast was still front & center in our mind’s stomachs, so for breakfast today we decided to head back to the fish market. Amazing as Unitoro was, we felt like we didn’t have the time for another hour’s waiting in line, so we found a fairly similar place with no line. If Unitoro was a 10, the place we found was a solid 8, and in the US it would have scored about 90. Apparently there are lots of fun eats in the Tsukiji Fish Market! Alas, I don’t recall the name of this one.
Like I said, breakfast was—again!—so good! Now our challenge was to find our way back to the Shinagawa Station to use our passes to get two reservations to Osaka. There was a line at the JR train station office, but not too bad. We ended up in car #16 of the bullet train (the very last car). I keep saying it, but dang these trains are so nice and smooth. And we saw Mt Fuji from the window!
Finally made it to Osaka, now the task was to find the subway and get to our hotel on the river in the Dotonburi area.
So we headed out to check out the sights of Dotonbori. Wow. It is kind of shocking at street level. Foreign culture overload! Even many Asians could be spotted standing stock-still, staring around slack-jawed. I’ve never seen anything like this area. To paraphrase the play Book of Morman, were we witnessing Scary Asian Hell?? It reminded me of the scene in Harry Potter VI where Fred & George’s joke shop is first unveiled: just an insanity of lights, noise, and motion that everyone is shocked to see.
This part of Osaka is an insane crush of people in an endlessly branching web of smaller and smaller streets, all jam-packed yet each one somehow still beguiling.
We struggled to find a place for dinner, everything looked/smelled like tourist fast-food stuff. In desperation we settled on something familiar to us: a sushi conveyor-belt restaurant. I think we were convinced because it had like a five-foot fish carcass out front as advertisement!
In my notes, I have the mysterious notation “Robert’s revolting yam mess. Just a crazy mass.” Unfortunately I have forgotten the details but I can kinda imagine, must have been dessert haha 😀
The conveyor-belt dinner was sorta fun but honestly disappointing food-wise, and so we got out of there pretty quickly to browse the crazy streets some more.
So yeah that was our introduction to Osaka!
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