Towers and ferris wheels

Monday morning started off overcast, with some showers forecast, so we set off with raincoats and umbrellas at hand. We walked to nearby Kuromon Ichiba markets, a large covered market selling all kinds of things including a lot of fresh produce - heaps of beef and shellfish and everything in between!

Kuromon Ichiba markets

After a quick coffee it looked like the rain was going to hold off after all so we walked down to another area called Shinsekai, which literally means "New World", easily recognisable by the tall Tsutenkaku tower  (the Eiffel tower of Osaka, apparently).

We wandered around the vibrant town lined with colourful shops and restaurants. The food that is tipica de la region here (within this particular town within Osaka) is kushikatsu, which are various skewered, battered and deep-fried meats, seafood and vegetables. Then we went up the top of the Tsutenkaku tower, which was a funny place indeed! You enter via a studio where there was a small audience watching a man doing tricks with a monkey. You then buy a ticket and enter a small round elevator up a couple of floors to a corridor lined with those capsule machines (capsules with little toys in them - they are everywhere in Osaka and Willow always wanted something from them, so this was not ideal!). So after getting our photo taken, which we then politely declined to buy even though they said how wonderful we looked, and then went up the long elevator ride up to the top, which had a movie playing of the tower exploding out of the earth to the theme of 2001 Space Odyssey. Hilarious!

 So we made it to the top which had a fabulous 360 degree view of Osaka, another sprawling metropolis. Once we had done a circuit, the only way out was to take the stairs down one level, to where you reach a sign saying not to walk down any more stairs as you would have to walk all the way to the bottom and it is just too far. Another option for them would have been just to rope off the stairs because if you didn't read English or Japanese you may not know to stop walking down the stairs.

So down one level, there was another 360 degree view of Osaka, but this level was filled with disco balls and playing loud techno music. So another loop, and then down the long escalator, playing another funny video, and you are ejected into a long winding maze through propoganda for Glico, a Japanese confectionary company, famous for Pocky and for the running man advertisement above Dotonburi, and various other souvenirs. So we sped through there before Willow could focus on anything for too long, and eventually managed to exit the tower. What a strange and funny place!

We then set off for some lunch, so found a place nearby for some kushikatsu! Accompanied with some chicken and rice for Willow, and some takoyaki octopus balls of course! Pretty good! And then we set off back on the walk home towards Namba, where Willow fell fast asleep, so we went back to the apartment for a bit for some chill time.

It gets dark pretty early since they're heading into winter, by 5pm, so we headed over to Dotonburi and since we love viewpoints from towers and ferris wheels so much, we went on the ferris wheel outside the Don Quioxte shop (a massive multi-level cheap shop selling absolutely EVERYTHING). This ferris wheel is a rectangle shape, and only reopened last year after being defunct many years, so I didn't even know it actually was a ferris wheel until I realised it was moving. It was pretty fun in those multi-colour pods, and although we had to buy Willow a full-price ticket (amazingly, Willow has been free for everything else (all the attractions and trains, even Disneyland and the shinkansen) it was pretty fun going vertically up above the city with all the sparkly lights.

After the ferris wheel, we went to a restaurant around the corner, which was probably a bit of a tourist trap, but it was some yummy food and Ryan ventured into trying some beef and horse sashimi (which we both had tried during our last visit, but I avoided it this time). As always, the staff loved Willow and she got a little toy camera as a gift, just for being her cute self.