Andre and Wendy: Osaka Walking tour, Osaka Castle and teamlab

The hotel we are staying at includes breakfast, breakfast is not served in the hotel but across the road in a little restaurant. There are 4 different choices you can have, all of them would be what we would typically eat for lunch or supper, not breakfast. Today we chose rice with onions and beef, a bowl of soup with noodles, and some pickled vegetables. I have no idea how much extra we paid to include breakfast, hope it wasn't too much.

We started our day today with a free walking tour called the Flag Ship of Free Walking Tour Osaka. Another fantastic tour led by Matt who is an American who has lived here for 12 years. Lots of great stories.

We started off in America-mura, which we had just walked through to get to the meeting point. I pretty hip part, some nice stores with unique t-shirts, but also a unique price, ouch.

We went through some local areas and heard many great stories.

We visited some spots that we have already seen like the Dotongori Glico sign.

Andres favourite may have been the Kuromon market, but it was so busy by the time we got there we didn't stick around for too much.

One of the many stories he told us about Osaka is that people stand on the escalators on the right here, and people can pass on the left. Everywhere else is the opposite in Japan, people stand on the left, and walk on the right on escalators for passing. This comes from Expo '70 that was held here, officials wanted to make everyone feel welcome so they decided to change and have stand right and move left on escalator's like most of the world. After Expo some sort of vote was taken and they decided to keep it like that, stand right, pass on left. We noticed it right away when we arrived here by train, fun to hear why.

Lunch was at a spot to try some local cuisine.

After lunch we decided to go visit Osaka Castle. Our guide this morning had told us it wasn't really worth going inside, especially since we will see an amazing castle coming up in our travels. We just walked around the castle grounds, with hundreds of other people. Caught the subway back to the hotel for a rest up before we head out again tonight.

Tonight we went to team lab Osaka, Botanical Garden. This was totally different than the one we went to in Tokyo. Tonight was all outside through a botanical garden, trees were lit up, there were different art things in the lake, and lots of fun walking through huge blown up balloon type things. A fun night doing something different.

Picked up a few snacks for moving day tomorrow and a little bit for supper after our huge lunch. Looking forward to our next adventure.

Steps 25,832 / 16 kms

some of the amazing signs as we walked to our walking tour

Very cool street lights in this district

Expo 2025 held in Osaka

This Cartier building was all wood, very cool

Liquor, chips and ice cream, all anyone really needs

Americauna area, can't you tell by the Statue of Liberty?

These backpacks are for young children up to grade 6. They can be used as a helmet in case of earthquakes, or flotation in case of tsunami. They cost a minimum of $300 cdn our guide told us, typically bought by grandparents!

2,500 vintage stores in this area

Concert hall

Crazy!

Claw games

Some of the billboards as we walked around

Dragon that had his tail cut off at the end because next door was complaining it went into his space. Tear drop on dragon is because of this, he is sad to lose part of his tail

Gambling is illegal in Japan. Workaround, you go into these places, play for a pack of cards, a shirt, etc etc, then there is a window around the corner that you can trade in your prize you won for money lol.

Plastic food replica store. This area is all restaurant and kitchen things. Many restaurants have plastic representation of their dishes outside their restaurants, this is where you buy them.