April 6th - Osaka in a nutshell, Pt. 1 - Kuromon and Dotonbori

After all the goodness from the day before my beloved City Inn Nishitanabe had another surprise for me. The breakfast buffet.

Frühstück City Inn style

A prime example of efficiency. Why waste space for a whole buffet, when you can offer Croissant with salami and rolls with wiener and cheese alongside some kind of dry cake with chocolate pieces already baked in?! To be fair they had 2 glasses of jam which you could have put on top of the wiener. Thanks to japanese baking proficiency those things were not really bad in the sense of awful or abhorrent, Just weird and lightyears below normal japanese customer care.

OK. Plan for today. Kuromon Ichiban, the biggest and best known market and shotengai in Osaka, then the world famous aquarium and at last Osaka castle and park.

The Kuromon Ichiban is located in Nanba / Dotonbori which is kind of the lively inner city. And I found it pretty nice. It has a distinct different feeling from Tokyo although it is almost as lively and full of people. But the people here smile a bit more, don't look at the floor so much and generally are a bit friendlier.

Osaka is famous for its staple foods, Takoyaki and Okonomiyaki are probably the most well known. With Kushikatsu one of the follow ups.

Just some views from the Kuromon and surrounding Dotonbory with the famous channel.

Whale stew. 8,50 €.

No touching. Ok. But why no photos? Thastwhy:  I actually ate one of the clam sticks. It was horrible. The clams were ok, but she (the old woman behind the lamp) assaulted them relentlessly with a bad sauce and completely wrong applied heat. The result was some weird gum like substance on a stick. The taste of the inner parts of the clams was good, so I suspect she took deliberate action to make them nearly inedible.

Tayaki deserve such love in marketing!

This is a real market, not a tourist attraction per se. You can do all your shopping there from fish over meat, groceries and daily necessities, All in a quite convenient surrounding.

Dotonbori proper is just a station away and is mostly famour for the canal and the things to do there.

Fugu.