It’s time to make the most of the last day of the trip and that means shopping, food, more shopping, and more food. After breakfast we split up into groups and hit the streets of Osaka. My group headed to the Nipponbashi shopping district, home to some of the most nerdy shops around. We were on mission. First we headed to the figurine shops (and spent waaaaay too much money).
I stopped by a used bookstore and bought some manga to take home (neeerrrrrrrd!!!!!). After a quick lunch at a café it was time to head to a massive department store called Tokyu Hands. Tokyu Hands = 8 floors of awesome. The first seven floors contain mostly household or daily use items (so many chopsticks to choose from! @_@). Seriously though, I spent about 2 hours just browsing. Then I bought myself a much needed computer bag and moved on to the final floor. The 8th floor contains the big finale: an arts and crafts store! Just what I needed. After staring rather longingly at the giant set of copic markers, I finally found jewelry making tools. Now you may be wondering why I had been looking for those and the answer to your unspoken inquiry is that at the start of the trip, after we exchanged our US dollars for Yen, I decided that five Yen pieces would make excellent necklace charms. And so I set out to find latches, links and ties. Mission accomplished! I can’t wait to work on them when I get home!
Shopping was a success and it was time to meet up with the rest of the crew to have our final group dinner. Tonight we were going native and traveling to a different restaurant for each course. First course = sushi. The sushi restaurant we chose to invade seemed to place high priority on freshness (made apparent by the large tank of live fish in the front of the establishment. And it is hard to pace yourself when the food is that good. >_< The second stop was for takoyaki and we did this one street food style. Ah yea, great food at scalding temperatures with a singing octopus overhead. Wait! What? A singing octopus?! 0_0 Yes, there was a giant singing octopus singing about takoyaki to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus overtop the stand we stopped at. Bizzare.
Our third stop took a little searching to locate. The small local restaurant had been highly recommended to us by a bar tender from what was claimed to be that smallest bar in the world. Struggling with the lack of pictures or English menus was undoubtedly worth the incredible food. Yakitori, tempora, duck, tofu salad and ginger ale . . . . . “KAMPAI!!!!”. We were all so full but we had one more stop to make. It was time for dessert. We went to a sweets shop called Zing that we had visited earlier in the trip and, after we were all reminded that Hannah had turned 20 on the first day, decided that birthday cake and soft serve ice-cream would be a perfect end to our food expedition. Jesse then proceeded to fulfill another Osakan tradition: eat until you’re sick.
