Friday, 24 Feb 2023
Today, on day 6, my portable wifi finally arrived. As mentioned on my part 1 post, I was expecting to collect my wifi unit at the airport, but due to some renovation being done at the pickup point at the airport (the Lawson store), they couldn’t deliver it. And I only got the notification after I landed.
Anyway, after numerous back and forth emails with the vendor, they finally delivered it to my apartment. Given the multiple devices within my travel group (i.e. mobile phones, tablets, laptop) and to avoid high roaming charges, we definitely needed this wifi unit.
I started the morning by having a simple coffee and pastry at Family Mart while setting up the wifi unit.
On our way to the train station, we visited Kinokuniya in Umeda. Malaysians are very familiar with Kinokuniya as it is the main bookstore in Suria KLCC.
While Kinokuniya in KLCC looks like a high end bookstore, in Japan, it looks like a normal bookstore (in my view, not as fancy as Tsutaya). That being said, they definitely had a lot of books at Kinokuniya, mostly in Japanese. They also had a large section for Japanese language books which I bought a few.
After we were done at Kinokuniya, we took the train from Umeda to Kaiyukan. Kaiyukan is one of the largest aquarium’s in the world, and the most spectacular in Japan.
There were a large number of fishes in the aquarium. Although, I felt that some of the aquarium looked rather empty (no corals), especially for the large fishes as we decended the Kaiyukan.
After our tour of Kaiyukan, we went to the nearby Tempozan Marketplace for late lunch.
Tempozan is a small mall next to Kaiyukan that has lots of eateries and gift shops. There are other attractions there too such as a Legoland Discovery Center and a giant Ferris Wheel (refer diagram above).
I saw a KFC at the foodcourt and decided to give it a try. I’ve always made a point to try out common fast foods (like McDonalds, KFC etc) in different countries to see how different it can get.
Later in the evening we headed back to Daimaru in Umeda. We wanted to check out the Doraemon Future Department Store. I took the opportunity to get a few cool looking Doraemon souvenirs.
After we were done at the Doraemon center, we headed to Umeda Food Hall at Hankyu Sanban Gai. I decided to give the korean restaurant a try and as expected, the food was amazing.
Related posts: Osaka 2023 part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6
Imran Jaafar 