Today was another travel day, and since we didn’t pack the night before, we didn’t have time to do much in Tokyo today. We started the day by packing, and then we checked out of the hotel to head to Tokyo Station. At the station, we dropped a duffel bag full of Lucy’s stuff off for longer-term storage (mostly wushu, clothes, and tax-free items that she wasn’t going to use in Japan at all). We grabbed some pastries and some lunch food to eat on the train, and then got on our Shinkansen to Osaka.
The train ride was largely uneventful (Benton thought it was cool that the trains don’t slow down that much in the cities/when going through train stations, which is different from trains in the US/Europe). Once we arrived we checked in to our hotel at Hotel Keihan Yodoyabashi and unpacked/rested for a bit.
We had dinner reservations booked at an omakase place at 8 pm, so we had a bit of time to kill before going to dinner. Benton found online that the Umeda Sky Building might be interesting (and it was a short walk from dinner), so we took the subway there.
The Umeda Sky Building itself was much cooler than we expected. We mainly went for the view, which was incredible, but we weren’t expecting the escalator between two skyscrapers when going to the top (Benton didn’t love that escalator ride, but he was willing to admit that it was pretty cool). After we left we walked through a small garden/park at the base of the building (The Island Garden), which was notable for two reasons:
Despite being quite small, the garden was dense enough that it very much felt like you were in nature if you stood in the middle.
There was a small “reverse waterfall” feature, which was essentially a waterfall, but with jets shooting water up the waterfall instead of letting gravity do the work.
We then roamed towards our omakase dinner at Sushi Yutaka. The location was pretty funny to find (it was essentially a small floor inside of what felt like an apartment building, but the interior was neat; essentially one big table around the sashimi chef). All of the sushi here was amazing, but the highlights were:
The umeshu (plum wine); we were both entertained that this is served “on the rock” (both because of the typo and because it would be funny to order “red wine on the rocks” in the US)
The squid was very good: very different from the squid that we are used to getting at sushi restaurants in the US (it just had a completely different, smooth texture)
We also had a big chunk of tuna nigiri (it was not surprising that this was good, but Benton was surprised at how much better this tuna was than most other raw tuna he has eaten).
After dinner, we picked up some taiyaki at Naruto Taiyaki Honpo before heading to KIRIP TRUMAN for cocktails.
Kirip Truman was a super interesting bar; a lot of the drinks were supposedly “chemically inspired” (i.e. finding different flavors to combine that wouldn’t intuitively go together). For instance, the drink that Lucy got was called “On Her Palm” and the ingredient list was: butter sauteed wagyu bacon vodka, peach, lemon, sparkling wine syrup, cardamom, and Glenfiddich 12. This drink was really weird and extremely tasty.
