Okonomiyaki in Osaka

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On Boxing Day we headed back to my neck of the woods in southern Nagano. We had a karaoke evening out with my English teacher friends on the first night, a meal out with my Eikaiwa group the next (they treated us to the hugest banquet of sushi and sashimi imaginable) and on the last day Dave was brave enough to venture into school with me and did a sterling job of helping teach a couple of classes, even introducing the kids to a few words of Spanish, which went down very well.

But after only a few days spent freezing in my little icebox of a house, we were more than ready to head for Osaka. Dave admitted that he thought I was exaggerating about how cold my house was - but now he can sympathise with my pain!

On our first night there we headed straight for downtown Dotonbori. With its throngs of people, bright lights, crazy neon adverts, giant mechanical crabs and all the okonomiyaki and takoyaki you could desire, I would describe it as the Las Vegas of Japan. We spent most of the evening soaking up the sights. Dave got a treat with his first okonomiyaki of the trip.

During the day we checked out the Umeda Sky Building. The building has two main towers connected with each other by a "Floating Garden Observatory" on the 39th floor. You get a great view of the city, but I was a little disappointed that the garden was in fact just an abstract concept - there wasn't a floating tree or bush in sight. Still, the structure is pretty impressive, garden or no garden.

The other highlight of Osaka was the giant aquarium. Now I'm not a massive fan of zoos or aquariums, but this one was pretty amazing. It is one of the biggest in the world and famous for its whale shark. It has 15 huge tanks which each display a specific region of the Pacific Rim. My favourites were the beautiful manta rays and the exquisitely delicate jellyfish.

The bells, the bells (and a giant monk-pig)

We heard there was a party open to the public up in the Umeda tower on New Year's Eve, so we headed there early to catch a night view of the city. We got there for nine and it was still quite empty. The night views of the city were beautiful and but there was quite the dodgiest Japanese boyband playing in the tower (including a guy with the worst perm we'd ever seen). We stayed until 10.30, then headed to a couple of temples in the city to watch the traditional midnight ringing of the bells. Disappointingly, both temples were pretty quiet. One of them surreally had a monk dressed as a giant pig (which was bad news for me with my irrational loathing of people in novelty animal costumes). We queued up for about ten minutes to ring the giant bell, only to find out when we almost reached our turn, there was a ticketing system and we didn't have one (much to the annoyance of the elderly Japanese guy behind us) - so we sheepishly left the queue to try and get a ticket. We eventually found where to get one, but then realised our number would probably take until about 1.30am (which explained why there were people sat watching television in a depressing looking waiting room), so we decided to call it a night. It was a bit of an anti climax and I kind of wished we'd stuck it out with the dodgy perm boyband to see in 2012!

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