Day 3 - Osaka

Today is the day that we left Tokyo and headed to Osaka. We got up and headed out to take the Shinkansen to Osaka. The thing about Shinkansen is that there is an online booking platform that can be reached in the US but its so much easier to just wait and book them at a terminal at a Shinkansen station here. We did get these tickets though and took the 2.5 hour ride down to Osaka. For anyone curious thats about 500 km or 310 miles which including that this trip made several stops along the way put us at an average of over 125 miles an hour. Pretty incredible. The top speed of the Shinkansen is 200/mph but I don't know if we made that speed on this trip based on our routes, though I wouldn't be surprised if we did.

We booked specifically for the right hand side of the train so that we could see Fuji from the train but it was mildly overcast. We did catch a glimpse of it but nothing crazy. Also I really meant to stay awake on this ride and see the country side but I crashed almost the moment we got moving. I can't tell if I was exhausted, jet lagged, or just easily put to sleep by trains (or all three) but I swear that train ride felt like 5 minutes. I kept waking up and seeing glimpses of the countryside and thinking how I wanted to stay awake to see it but I was down for the count on this train.

We got to Shin-Osaka and then took a local subway to our Namba station and walked to our airbnb (about 10-15 minutes). Luckily the guy let us check in early and so we were able to drop our bags off and go exploring. Osaka is like a little Tokyo in a lot of ways and we were pretty close to a tourist center with lots of food and shops. We stopped into a shop for ramen for lunch and I was struck again by how incredible the restaurant system is around here. Almost every single place we've been is small, sometimes with only 8 or so seats in the place, but even the ones with more seats you will often find entire restaurants with only two employees. And these two do all the table waiting, cooking, and dishes. Its really quite a treat to see them work. I especially enjoy that most of the smaller places are a single counter lining a kitchen space so the entire time you're eating and waiting you can watch them cook which is so much fun.

I did a super quick google search and it says there are over 160,000 restaurants in Tokyo. With like 14m people thats approximately 87.5 people per restaurant. For comparison, google says there's like 630k people in Portland and 536 restaurants which is 1175 people per restaurant. Regardless of if these are completely accurate and if they're legal city limits vs overall area I think its safe to say that Tokyo has a lot more restaurants per capita than Portland. And they're all tiny! And there's people in them at all hours of the day for every type of food. It doesn't matter if its a katsu or ramen place at 10am, you will find people there. I love that about Tokyo, its such a bustling and alive city and with borderline no traffic (I never actually saw a highway while here but we never once saw it seem crowded in the city streets, again I credit their metro system and willingness to walk for this). Sam and I agree that it is basically the pinnacle of cities.

Anyway, we ended up walking around and seeing a cool local temple and then taking a train to go see Osaka Castle. Osaka castle is beautiful and from the outside looks super cool and old and such but its completely renovated on the inside to kind of be a museum and there's no historical architecture to see or anything on the inside so I honestly found it to be a bit of a let down. Also it was hot and we were sweaty. We ended the night a tad bit early and just got some dumplings near our place before calling it. We had to get up the next day at like 5am to get to Kyoto so we took it easy on our travel/Osaka day.

We had the option to stay in Osaka and travel to Kyoto and Nara or stay in Kyoto. We chose to stay in Osaka and I can't tell you exactly why that was but looking back I think thats maybe the single thing I would've changed about this trip is that we should've stayed in Kyoto. I'm writing this from our hotel in Tokyo on our last night in town (our flight is tomorrow at 4:40pm) and I will say that most of the "what would we do different" is really just "I wish we had more time" but I really think that Sam and I are more Kyoto type travelers than Osaka type travelers.

Osaka is loud, bright, and has a cool night life I've heard. We don't drink and have been getting up at 5am this trip so I think at least some of the interest was lost on us. Kyoto on the other hand has a much slower and older feel with more temples, gardens, and natural things to look at. Also things that we would've benefited arriving by 6am to had we stayed there. Honestly unless I see something super inspiring I'll probably skip Osaka on any future trips through Japan.

Oh also I should add that I'm not intentionally skipping out on photos. The wifi at the Ryokan in Hakone was horrendous and I didn't have time or energy in either Osaka or on the Shimanami Kaido. So once we're home stateside I will be uploading photos. Honestly I'm wildly impressed with myself for even writing this on this trip. I realize now that I've had a several year hiatus because this is hard! It takes time and mental energy to write something and forget about reviewing your pictures for the day, adding them in a way that makes sense, and of course Wix has its various like display options too. This takes work lol. The writing alone generally can take me an hour per post. Frankly I'm surprised I have as many as I do and that I was so consistent for so long, how did I have time? Or energy? How often was I in my hotel writing these? Very committed of my former self. And I am going to try to be better about this moving forward too!