The view from our balcony in Kyoto, this morning
In under 30 minutes of train travel we found ourselves in ........
Read the sign carefully , as it is one of the very few English signs in Osaka, and it is an understatement.
It is certainly the size of a city, but the most elaborate, poorly signed, difficult to navigate city I have ever experienced.
Now I can get to the title of this post.
The telling or recollection of a memory is almost invariably coloured by the audience, and can sometimes have scarce connection with the actual occurrence.
The sharing of a story is done to entertain and does not need to be even close fact.
Then there's the reality.
I don't remember Osaka being like this.
I have not read or watched one travel article, and I have read and seen a lot, that prepares a new arrival to Osaka very well, and most of them absolutely poorly.
Today we were confronted by the reality.
We had planned one and half days here and for a short while, despite a lot of hunting information and trying to get to understand how to commute, it was looking like we going to spend most of those ~36 hours trying to figure out where the hell we were, or even if we had made it out of the train station.
Osaka does not cater for non-Japanese, and barely caters for non-Osakans!
In twenty years they did seem to have lost any of their "We are from Osaka, you are in Osaka and if you don't like it, bad luck!" attitude.
I admired it then, now it sucks.
We managed to get to Dotonbori, the long way, both in time and in distance.
As you can see the main drag was quite busy,
and just kept busier and busier as the afternoon progressed
It was mid-afternoon and we settled in to this place for a feed of sushi.
We enjoyed it, but it was not Tsukiji market standard sushi.
... but lunch had not finished yet ...
Not until we had a feed of of the famous Osaka Tako-yaki
Now that box is ticked
And here are few more pictures of the Dotonbori area, including some of the quieter back alleys, all with something to share.
As seen on countless You Tube videos and cooking and travel shows,
this place is rated #1 in Osaka.
And finally a picture of a people mover, that is slammed and has bling wheels.
Why? Because I like people movers, I like cars that are lowered to the point of being nearly unusable ("slammed") and I like wheels that can sometimes be more expensive than the car they are on ("bling").
As there is no public transport "code to crack" in Osaka we will look forward to wandering around like headless chooks and hope that we stumble across the Osaka Castle, the Doguayasugi area for chefs gear and maybe the Kuromon Ichiba Market.
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