Dotonbori

We ventured away from Universal today and made our way to The Namba district in Osaka. This place is crazy. Good crazy. This is the antithesis of where my children live. One must be careful not to be swept away by the river of people nor run over by the crazy bike riders who weave their way through.

 


We had two missions upon arrival. First, find the hotel. Second, find a place to feed our poor, starving children. It took us a while to figure out which crazy crowded corridor to take to get to our place. Eventually we chose the right one and were able to check in and leave our bags up front while we waited for our room to be available. This led to the search for our lunch. We always struggle with the kids figuring out what they want. Now we found ourselves planted in a whole new place with the same dilemma. We tried to explain that we should look for a busy place because that’s where the food will be good. 

We stumbled on a tiny little noodle shop with a blue noren and a name we couldn’t read. This place was the best. It was a bar wrapped around a tiny kitchen. The owner was a super friendly guy who spoke a little English. He was excited to know we came from Hawaii and even more excited to know we were originally from California because he is heading there soon for vacation.  He seemed genuinely interested in us.  Taught us about the different types of noodles for the different areas in Japan.  We paid 320 yen for big bowl of delicious ramen.  Fiona raved about it.  That's saying something!  His not so friendly female counterpart (assumed to be his wife) warmed up to us and ended up teaching Fi some tricks for chopsticks and high fiving Mack as we left.  He doesn't know it, but some lady from Hawaii liked him so much that she is blogging about him right now.  Perhaps another bowl of his ramen before we move on.  

Funny that our day revolved around food.  Our evening mission would be wandering around the streets of Dotonbori looking for another place our children would consider eating.  This mission took a while, a few tears, and a lot of refusals.  We finally found a place that had yakisoba with veggies. You can see the steam from it cooking on our table.  Mack was very nervous about our hot table.  Fi gave this one a double thumbs up. 

After dinner we roamed around the river waiting for the lights to come on.  If you haven't ever seen the Glico Running Man, you should Google Dotonbori.  It's larger than life and brighter too.  Overall, it was a lovely evening.  It's a lot of walking and the girls are adjusting to all the changes still.  These are some lucky girls to experience all of this.  I'll finish today by sharing some of the photos of the day. Tomorrow we visit Osaka Castle.  Sayonara!