Today, we woke up and grabbed some convenience store breakfast. Benton tried a fruit sandwich, since those seem to be popular in Japan (it was fine, but Benton was generally unimpressed). By now, we had figured out how to deal with the lack of public trash cans (by either bringing a plastic bag along to store trash in or by bringing trash into the train stations, which had trash cans around half of the time.
We took the train to Osaka Castle, where we roamed around the grounds a bit (the weather was pretty nice today), amused by the numerous groups of school children with matching hat colors. After walking around the castle, we went to the Shin Sekai “New World” area, which had a lot of food, and used to be a really run-down neighborhood (definitely touristy). We grabbed some fried food for lunch and also ordered some horse sashimi. (The horse was interesting but had a tough texture).
From Shin Sekai, we walked to Shitenno-ji (a Buddhist temple). We arrived ~30 minutes before closing, and had a rather strange experience going up a tower:
One of the staff watched us/let us go up one of the small towers
We got most of the way to the top, and the lights went off
We walked down and were able to push open the door enough to unhook the rope keeping the door shut to let ourselves out
We were then greeted by the same lady who watched us go up the tower, shocked that there were people inside (she was getting ready to lock the building for real)
Overall odd, but kind of funny
Since today was Halloween, we decided it would be fun to go at least see the Dotonbori area. After making a quick stop at the hotel to rest for a bit, we headed to Dotonburi to grab some street food/walk around a bit. It was super busy (as expected, with lots of people walking around in costumes), but we were still able to pretty easily wander along the river, grabbing some takoyaki along the way. We also had some milk-flavored cremia (a style of soft serve ice cream), and it did actually have a pretty strong milk taste 🥛. We walked through a couple of alleyways to check out other places to eat, finally landing on an okonomiyaki place. We did get okonomiyaki, which was tasty. We also chose to order “broiled ray,” which had a really tough/hard/chewy texture but was full of flavor.
By the time we finished dinner, the Halloween crowd had gotten much worse (~10 minutes for us to go one block), so we left to get taiyaki near the Hommachi Station subway stop before taking the ~20-minute walk back to our hotel to sleep.
