Saturday morning already and it was our last full day in Japan! Last time Willow had loved seeing all the deer in Nara so she wanted to go back. Nara is about 45 minutes outside of Osaka but that's not really that far so off we went for a quick visit. It was lovely seeing all the deer again - apparently they had suffered a bit during Covid without all the tourists to give them their crackers!
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| Back in deer land (Nara) |
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Feeding the deer crackers
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I still can't believe how tame they are, and how they wait for the tourists to buy the crackers from the stalls rather than just take them from the stalls themselves!! Ryan didn't get bitten on the butt this time either 😂 although they did seem to do more nuzzling into your knee if you had crackers than I remember from last time. It really is a beautiful place, so we wandered around for an hour or so, but we wanted to be back in Osaka for lunch as our time for yummy meals was limited!
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| A beautiful place |
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| Deer everywhere |
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| These trees were all Autumn colours last time |
Before we knew it we were back in Osaka and found a place for lunch - the place with the big crab down in Dotonbori! The big crab means it sells crab - and only crab. It was another place where we sat down in those sunken tables (horigotatsu) after taking your shoes off, and I again cursed myself for wearing my Converse boots with the double knots 😖
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| Crab, and only crab |
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| Crab many ways |
So we enjoyed crab many ways - Willow attempted some crab croquettes, and we had crab sushi, tempura and crab gratin! After popping back into Don Quijote for some souvenirs, we went back to the hotel for a little R&R as we had one last eventful evening planned! We had an early dinner at Gyozaoh! - a place we went to a couple of times last time that we loved. And they still had the sake tasting flights, woohoo! So some gyoza, takoyaki, pickled cucumber, chicken karaage, cheesy fried potato and sake-infused clams later, we were full and ready to head to
TeamLab Botanical Gardens  |
| TeamLab Botanical Gardens |
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| TeamLab Botanical Gardens |
Truth be told I only found out about this TeamLab installment in Osaka when I was sitting at reception at our Tokyo hotel at 2:30pm waiting for our room to be ready 😂 So I bought tickets right there on the spot without a thought. This one is outdoors and only at night, so quite different in a way. And it was beautiful - everything interacting with real nature (as it is literally in some botanical gardens). Unfortunately being in real nature in the outdoors meant it was much harder to capture it on camera!
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| Couldn't capture how cool it was |
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| This "egg garden" thing was super cool |
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| Always have to try and get a family selfie |
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| Willow mastering the Instagram pose |
There were about 7 or so different areas, all beautiful and accompanied by that familiar cinematic ambient soundtrack that TeamLab does. We stayed for over an hour - I could have stayed longer but Willow was pretty beat. Can you blame her? We had packed so much into our 10 nights! But weary bodies aside, none of us wanted to go home and we found ourselves talking about "next time" 😜
Sunday was just a travel day - a sleep-in, packing up, getting the Shinkansen back to Tokyo (thank God that went smoothly as Golden Week of holidays was about to start when apparently transport is mayhem).
So we wrap the blog up here for now, back at home in Sydney, until the next same-cation in Japan LOL 😂😅😆😘
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