30 January - Osaka

Today we got up and went straight back to Osaka. Charles wanted to see the Umeda Sky Building. It's really two towers which are joined at the top with an enormous disc and some huge escalators. We took the lift to the 35th floor, and were surprised and terrified when the lift was glass and we could see all around us. It was shockingly scary and rad. We paid a fee to go to the upper disc and had to go up a giant escalator that was also in glass and was also scary. It was pretty empty, but they had a campaign for Valentine's Day on, so everything was for lovers. It was totally weird. In Australia apparently nobody is ever in love (according to the media?), but in Japan love is all the rage. It would suck if you went up the Umeda Sky Building without a boy/girlfriend because of all the love stuff. Anyway... we had a coffee.

We went up onto the observation deck where we could see all of Osaka. It was windy and bright, and there was a place that was "reserved for lovers", possibly because it was romantic during sunset or something. Since it was midday there was no difference between that place and anywhere else on the deck. Weird?

Down on the ground again we went back to Shinsaibashi, where we had spent a lot of last night. We went to the underground mall called Crysta, where we had spent a lot of time in our 2008 trip. It was not nearly as cool as we remembered, but we also remembered that we had never actually bought anything at Crysta last time either. We had lunch in an Okonomiyaki restaurant down there, which was pretty nice. Osaka okonomiyaki has noodles in it as well as cabbage.

Next we took a train further south (or something) back to Namba to look again at the interesting people and places. There were lots of boys/men with long leather shoes, tall blonded hair, leather, chains, and eyeliner. There were also lots of girls/women with tall shoes, tall blonded hair, fake fur, bling, and false eyelashes. We went to Tokyu Hands which is one of Charles' favourite shops (along with Loft and Muji) and Christina bought him a pocket knife, and we bought a cool toy camera that takes FOUR PHOTOS in ONE SECOND and works on film and is cute. We wanted one ever since our friend had one that was cool. We're going to load it up and take photos tomorrow but we can't upload them to the internet!

Christina found a few interesting shops - an Atelier Pierrot, Marble (had never seen this one before, and didn't like it much), and Baby, The Stars Shine Bright. This is how we know she's not a real Lolita (even hate writing that name): she doesn't really like Baby. We bypassed all the dresses save an Alice and the Pirates one, and ended up only buying some cute earrings that were half price.

We went to a Beams for Men shop which had a lot of great clothes that Charles sort of liked, but he's "not into fads" so didn't buy anything except for a small Porter change purse. Not into fads, but into bag brands. He's happy now and puts his small change in it.

We were tired then and made our way back to Osaka station to take the shinkansen back to Kyoto. We were the only ones in the entire carriage. Once back in Kyoto, we got some takeaway katsudon and oyakodon from a place close to our hotel. It was delicious!