Today, Benton needed to do laundry (which was in the hotel), so we started the day by putting Benton’s laundry (plus a few of Lucy’s clothes) into the washer. The timer on this said the laundry would be done in ~2 hours, so we decided that was enough time to run and grab breakfast + get some matcha powder.
We went to MONDIAL KAFFEE 328 CLUB A for breakfast/coffee. Lucy got a lemon + honey smoothie (very good). Benton was a bit surprised that he couldn’t order a cappuccino, so he just ordered a latte instead, which turned out to be a cappuccino ☕. After breakfast, we headed to Ujikoen Osaka-shinsaibashito pick up some matcha powder (Lucy had to grab some for her mom, and Benton decided to grab a small amount to try messing with back in NYC). We had a little bit of time left, so we walked into an Onitsuka Tiger shop (a Japanese shoe brand, owned by ASICS). Benton actually saw some shoes that he liked, but we didn’t have much time to try shoes on, and the store was a bit of a zoo, so we decided we could go to a different location later.
When we got back to the hotel and picked up our laundry, we discovered that, just like in Europe, “dryer” really means “steamer”, as all of our clothes came out hot, but also soaking wet. We spent a bit of time finding every possible way to hang up our clothes in the hotel room, before walking through the pouring rain to a Michelin Bib Gourmand udon place (Udondokoro Shigemi). The wait ended up only being about 15 minutes (probably partly due to the weather), and the udon was delicious.
From lunch, we walked (through much less rain) to Umeda, where we stopped at a department store named Hands (Lucy had been to one before and remembered it had a lot of stationery stuff). Lucy bought a lot of pens 🖊️.
We also stopped by a grocery store to get some fruits and ended up paying for the nicer, but not super expensive grapes (~$15 for one big bunch), and also some pretty expensive persimmons.
Note: we didn’t actually eat any of the fruit on this day, but the grapes were really, really, really good when we did try them, and the persimmons were super juicy. It’s kind of interesting that Japan has fruits where you can pay for different levels based on “how good” those fruits will taste.
After the grocery store, we went back to the hotel and tried to use the dryer more on the clothes that were still wet (the dryer helped a bit, but not much). We also rested a bit.
Before dinner, we decided to go back to Onitsuka Tiger (the shoe store), where Benton discovered that they were out of his size. We then went into the mall nearby since they supposedly had another location, but that location was the luxury version of the brand. When we left that store, the mall was closing, and it was funny to watch the crowd of people leaving on the escalator grow larger and larger as we went down each floor.
We decided that we wanted to get some tonkatsu (since we hadn’t had it yet on the trip), and Benton looked around for a place nearby, but outside of a touristy zone. He landed on とんかつ 豚しゃぶ 樋ぞの, and this ended up being amazing (TODO add a footnote: we kept thinking about how good this pork was, and had katsu 3 more times to see if maybe that’s just how it is in Japan. While most were very good, none came close to this place. Would go back). Benton got a normal pork cutlet, while Lucy got katsudon. The chef was super nice and seemed entertained that we had wandered in.
After dinner, we walked back to Kirip Truman (the same cocktail bar that we went to on our first day in Osaka), but it was packed and we were told booked out for the night (when we went the first time it was a Wednesday, so it made sense that it was much busier on a Saturday).
Instead of the bar, we just went back to the hotel and packed. Lucy switched our train tickets for the following day a few times (various online sources were inconsistent), but ultimately we took our original train 🚆.
