To Osaka

Despite staying right at the main train station, I get worried with train connections so I dragged everyone there at 9am to eat breakfast at Andersen’s and then to pick up bento boxes for lunch. The main train station had a whole gallery of bento box vendors that was amazing beyond compare. Charles picked up some buns and I got a unagi bento box for Christopher. I had been a bit worried about luggage space on the train - Charles said his Japanese coworker said to reserve luggage space but I found nothing of the sort online. But we did have reserved seats so I figured that should be good enough. Surprisingly when we got on, we were able to fit our big bags of luggage on the overhead rack above us. Maybe that wasn’t the safest thing but it did fit! That was great though since for European trains, dealing with the luggage is a pain.

Our train left at 10:30 which got us into Shin Osaka at 1:15 or so. I had been debating whether to take a taxi to the hotel because of the luggage but it did look like only 1 subway line and it turned out to be surprisingly easy. Our hotel was right near the main shopping area and only 2 blocks from the station. Since I had changed our itinerary so last minute, my main focus was findng a hotel with self service laundry since Charles was in a bit of a laundry crunch since he had been in Tokyo for 2 weeks now and expensive hotels just don’t have laundry facilities. This hotel turned out to be a lot cheaper out of all our hotels so I booked 2 rooms again and even breakfast. I was definitely getting a little tired of having to look for breakfast every morning.

After dropping by the hotel, we headed out to Osaka castle and yes there were lines going into the castle but turned out it was all for the elevator since a lot of the visitors were from a cruise ship and couldn’t make it up the stairs. So we were able to get a nice workout going up to the very top to see some views. Back down we went and the kids were asking for ice cream now which we found at a vending machine.

View from the top of Osaka Castle

I navigated us back via different route to explore and we found a cool playground with a long slide. The rest of the playground did look a bit rusted but the kids loved the slide. Also ended up talking to a couple with a baby who were from the cruise ship as well. Our dinner hunt for the night involved a little wandering in the underground looking for options.We ended up just at a random sushi bar place. But it did remind me that wandering around and randomly picking a restaurant always felt a little stressful because we get a little hangry and frustrated trying to pick.

Playground near Osaka Castle