Day 10: Osaka – Walking About

We finished our visit to Kaiyukan, lunched at First Kitchen at the Tempozan Harbor Village next door to the aquarium, then traveled back the Umeda area. We still had several hours to kill before heading back to The Lutheran Hotel to pick up our luggage that we’d left at the concierge and head to the airport, so we explored the area a bit more on foot, eventually finishing at Yodobashi Umeda mall for shopping and dinner.

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A view of Osaka from The Hilton Plaza West. Osaka with its glass towers and skyscrapers is so unlike Kyoto.
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Part of the Osaka Garden City. It's probably hard to tell from this picture, but on the floor where those potted plants are are hundreds of empty glass bottles.
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Inside The Hildon Plaza West. The first six floors of retail outlets and cafes is serviced by a pair of glass elevators. Even the lift button panels are glass. Real cool. :)
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Elder brother asked us to look for Green tea Kit-Kat, and we'd been trying to find it in vain throughout the trip... only to finally find the item at a kiosk at Subway Umeda Station. You can see Ling's look of triumph!

Dinner was at a level 9 restaurant called Hong Kong Chon Long offering Chinese cuisine, buffet style. There were several other eateries on the floor, but at this point in our trip, we were pretty tired of Japanese food already and were both tired from all the walking and just wanted a place to stone. Per head cost was about 2,100円 per person including drinks; relatively pricey for this floor, but the offerings were rather disappointing. I didn’t enjoy the dim sum as they tasted as though they were made from the same shrimp paste – heck, even the Hougang Mall kopitiam whips out better dim sum than this. The Chinese-styled stir fry tasted better, especially the fried noodles and rice, and the sweet & sour pork ribs, though there wasn’t really much range or variety.

Which led me to conclude to Ling; I think we should just avoid trying out non-local cuisine at this price range the next time we’re in Japan. We should just stick to their national fare which they do consistently do better in, in our experience anyway.

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Should have gone with our instincts and went somewhere else for dinner.
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It might had been because we were at an early dinner at about 4:45 PM, but several dishes advertized at the front display weren't avilable in the buffet spread itself.

2 thoughts on “Day 10: Osaka – Walking About

  1. Yep. We’d all but given up on finding the item, with Ling concluding that it was most likely a seasonal item. And lo behold; finding it in a subway kiosk. =)

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